


Swallow

by NoFootprintsInSand



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Biting, Drama, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, I like birds, It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Don’t Feel Fine), John Seed Is His Own Warning, John is John is John, Marking, Possessive Behavior, Rough Sex, Secret Relationship, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2020-08-23 19:01:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 25,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20247763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoFootprintsInSand/pseuds/NoFootprintsInSand
Summary: “She wonders, not for the first time, if he’s got some finely honed, near supernatural instinct for her. If this thread of copper that she senses between them serves as a conductor, if he can feel the vibrations of her heartbeats down it and follow them to find her.”The first time he comes to her deep in the woods. The second time he tells her that a dream is real. The third time she breaks his nose.And so it goes.





	1. A Murder of Crows

**Author's Note:**

> All my thanks to Unquiet_Grave who didn’t block my email address when I told her I had another John/Dep fic cooking, but instead is doing her usual fucking excellent job editing and suggesting and improving. I totally don’t deserve it, but goddamn am I grateful.

* * *

_ Was it worth all that war just to win? _

_ So caught up in the speed of the days in your sin _

_ Don't forget how the story begins_

_No, don’t forget now _

Patrick Wolf, ‘Overture’

* * *

**  
** _ She stops a couple of yards away from him, breath hissing in her throat, iron tang swirling on her tongue, fireflies in front of her eyes. _

_ But there is no Bliss here. _

_ Just wrath. _

_ Just him and her, adrenaline and bloodlust binding them together in chains of barbed wire. They are both terribly injured, and they are both refusing to give up. _

_ A fight to the death, then. _

_ She throws her gun down. Follows with her knives. Shows him that she intends to kill him with her bare hands. Nothing between them. Just skin on skin and life leaving his eyes. _

_ She smiles, and she knows that her grin is as insane and wild as his. _

_ It feels good. _

**Chapter One: A Murder of Crows**

The first time he comes to her deep in the woods.

He walks from the night straight into the circle of illumination thrown by her small fire. 

Bleakly she thinks that she ought to have known. She had heard disturbed crows calling just a few moments ago, heard the beating of strong wings in the dark. 

She’s curled up by a hasty, haphazard campfire, in a filthy sleeping bag she’s found at an abandoned hunting hut on her way. Nothing else. She’d lost her journey pack and car and most of her weapons down at US Auto earlier that day, forced to flee in the face of an onslaught of cultists she had failed to anticipate. She’s bone weary, all she wants is to lick her wounds and regroup mentally, surrounded by the familiar, comforting sounds of the forest.

But now John Seed has shown up. 

He should be entirely out of place out here. She feels as though he’s forced an entry from his reality into hers, eked out a space for himself somewhere he doesn’t belong. And yet the fabric of space and time appears undisturbed by his presence, as if he’s somehow capable of moving between realities with his silks and brash jewels and friendly, deadly smile.

It’s early autumn and there is the vindictive promise of a deep chill in the night. It’s already enough to redden her cheeks, enough to make her sit close to the fire, grateful for its warmth. But he is in his shirt sleeves, no sign of his greatcoat. He doesn’t appear to be bothered by the cold, emphasizing the otherworldliness she senses around him, even though she knows, _ knows _ that he is human. A terrible human, cruel and warped, glorying in pain.

He must have walked for some distance to reach her. There are no passable tracks that she’s aware of anywhere near. She’d heard no engine noise, and out here, far from artificial lights and sounds, it would’ve carried over long distances. 

As he passes through the firelight she sees that he’s got something slung over one shoulder. She recognises it as her battered journey pack, and tenses even more. 

He sits down on a tree trunk on the other side of the fire from her. Easy, relaxed, dark hair falling down his forehead. He holds his hands up to show himself unarmed, eyebrows raised at the service weapon she’s aiming straight at his chest. 

Like she’s insulting him grievously by not trusting him.

“Good evening, Deputy.”

She keeps her gun trained on him, unwavering, trigger finger twitching, itching, _ longing_. 

“How did you find me?”

He quirks his mouth, still showing her his hands, so affable, so _ friendly_, not at all a barely caged beast.

Except he is. 

“I’ve got ears and eyes everywhere. Holland Valley belongs to me, and me only.”

A not very subtle warning. She doesn’t take her eyes off him, but strains her own ears, tries to listen to the darkness of the forest, tries to absorb its secrets and hidden noises through her skin. 

Perhaps he has scouts and they had followed her all the way from the car shop. Perhaps she is surrounded by scores of bearded, reeking cultists, watching their Herald sitting here with her exposed in the light. But if so, she can’t get a sense of them, and that bothers her. 

She’s normally better than this, and she wonders if his mere presence serves to blunt her instincts. 

She returns all of her attention to the dark man in front of her, sees him through flames, and she thinks that fire suits him. 

“Have you got people out there?”

He only smiles, and she knows he won’t tell her either way. Knows enough of him by now to realise that he enjoys stringing people up and along, both literally and figuratively. 

“It doesn’t matter. I came simply to talk.”

She feels her fingers turn to claws around the gun. 

“Talk? You tried to _ drown _ me.”

In fact, she can still see the indents on his arms, just below his rolled up shirt sleeves and nestled among all his scars and tattoos. Little half moons lit by firelight, left by scratching, desperate nails.

She had thought he would do it. She had thought he would drown her. His eyes had told her that he would. So had his small, secret smile. It had been just for her, a private little thing between them, and it had grown grotesque from underneath the surface.

It had been such a beautiful night too, a night like this one, moonlit and heavy with sounds and smells. Somehow that had made it worse, had made her fear for her life more of an insult. 

“Yes,” he says. “But I didn’t.”

“No,” she says. “Because you were stopped.”

He shrugs, and his light eyes seem to pick up the darkness around him. They are midnight now. 

“I would’ve stopped on my own accord.”

She scoffs, and holds the gun steady.

“_When_? When would you have stopped?”

“When you went limp.”

His voice is distant, almost soft, gaze turned inward. Pupils dilated. Nightdreaming of having her life thrumming in his hands. 

She shivers where she sits on the ground, feeling exposed and in danger even though she’s got her weapon aimed straight at his heart, even though he lounges there relaxed and unarmed. Her voice is wispy as she speaks.

**“**Is that how you usually do these baptisms?”

His answer is immediate.

“No. But your fury almost cut clean through the Bliss. It was quite something. It was _ delicious. _I wanted to see if the river could temper it. Then Joseph came along and proclaimed you something special. Which,” he says as an aside, “I just don’t see.”

He draws his eyes along her where she sits, tatted sleeping bag up to her waist, dew in her hair, barely checked rage crackling between fingertips and gun.

“You don’t seem all that. You blow things up and kill people and you are a nuisance. Crude. No _ finesse. _Your anger is a beautiful thing, of course, but not nearly honed enough. Then again, I have yet to see Joseph wrong.”

She shakes herself, tries to take her mind and body outside this eerie bubble he created by his arrival, by sitting down with her out here in the woods.

“Why are you here?”

“I just wanted to come and say hello. One on one. A lot more _ intimate _ than a mass baptism, wouldn't you agree?”

It’s the lawyer and the TV evangelist sitting on the other side of the fire from her now. Smiling, open, earnest. But she can see the _ other _ him flicker across his face like static, marring him, making his contours soluble. Straining, struggling to break through. She remembers his propaganda video, his broadcast, how he’d gone from charismatic to terrifying in just a few breathless moments.

As for that...

“How’s Hudson? What have you _ done _ to her?”

She’s ashamed that she’d not thought to ask until now. Hudson should have been her first thought, not the fifth. Or sixth. She ought to do better than this. _ Be _ better.

He tilts his head.

“Ah, yes. Dear Deputy Hudson is somewhat battered and bruised. But nothing truly..._ permanent _ has happened to her. And it could stay that way, you know. She could be kept as is. Just a few marks here and there for show, a bad hair day. That sort of thing.”

“_If_? What do you want in return?”

“Access. To you.”

He throws his hands out, reassuring, calming. 

“Only every now and then, you understand. Some conversation, a bit of insight. Away from the maddening crowds, as it were.”

“Why?”

“It’s only prudent to do one’s due diligence. Know thy enemy. Conversely, if you’re as important as Joseph says, well, then…it would be remiss of me not to get to know you.”

Her mind works in strange loops and turns. Allowing John Seed anywhere near her, even just on a semi-regular basis, would be foolish. She ought to do the intelligent, _ strategic _ thing and tell him to go to hell. On the other hand, while she hadn’t known Joey Hudson for more than a couple of days before they jumped on the helicopter bound for Hope County, she was pretty sure that the right, _ normal _ thing to do was to protect the people on her side. The good side. 

A good person would not abandon Joey Hudson to her fate.

Even so.

“Is this recruitment or infiltration?”

“I don’t know yet.”

This is the first thing he’s said during their conversation that sounds like the truth, and that makes her not trust it at all.

“I move around a lot. I doubt you’ll find me.” 

As a matter of fact, she plans to leave Holland Valley at first light, now when she knows he’s truly caught her scent.

He smiles once more.

“Oh, I’ll find you again, don’t worry about it. We’ll talk some more. In the meantime I’ll keep Deputy Hudson safe and sound for you.” 

He stands up and she can feel herself go taut and quiet inside, ready to spring. Hating the feeling of sitting small on the ground while he stands tall above her. 

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he says, and she twitches.

He takes her journey pack from his shoulder, throws it on the ground between them, and she very nearly shoots him point blank. She’s a bundle of raw nerves, just waiting for him to finally strike. 

“Your pack,” he says. “Thought you might need it.”

It had landed with a soft sound, not nearly as heavy as it should have been, and he smiles at her raised eyebrow.

“Naturally I had your ammunition removed.” He runs his eyes along her scratches and bruises. “Left the med kit, though. Looks like you have use of it.”

Then he nods at her, jovial but lethal underneath; she knows predators and he is one. 

“Sleep well, Deputy.”

He turns to leave and she sees a handgun tucked into the waist of his jeans at the small of his back. At her hiss he smiles at her over his shoulder, then walks easily back into the darkness.

She doesn’t lower her gun until she’s sure he’s gone. Her arms and shoulders ache.

She sees that he’s left a copy of the Book of Joseph sitting on the tree trunk. 

She hurls it into the fire, and she can’t sleep all night.


	2. A Murmuration of Starlings

_ He lands the first blow. His fist drives into her stomach, and she is dumbly surprised. He’s faster than she had thought, even as hurt as he is. _

_ He follows with a punch to her jaw, snaps her already burning face violently to the side, and she hisses when the taste of blood blossoms on her tongue. _

_ But even so. _

** _Even so,_ ** _ it occurs to her that he is trying not to hurt her too badly, that he’s holding his punches, only letting half the blood he could. _

_ It makes her aflame with anger. Neither of them deserve restraint or compassion. _

_ She growls when she swings back, punches his nose, intent on breaking it again and driving fragments of bone into his fevered, broken brain. _

**Chapter 2: A Murmuration of Starlings**

The second time he tells her that a dream is real.

She stands on the very edge of a steep, high ridge somewhere between Holland Valley and the Henbane. She’s watching an enormous flock of birds dance in the air. They are undulating around mystery, a darkly archaic choreography she couldn’t possibly begin to comprehend. 

But she’s entranced, swept away. Swooping through the cold dusk light with the birds, has grown wings just to soar with them; she’s somewhere else now.

Not trapped here.

“A murmuration,” comes his voice from behind her, and she starts. For a second she’s in freefall, but his hands are heavy on her shoulders as he pulls her back from the edge, in towards him. 

“A murmuration of starlings,” he continues. “It’s quite spectacular.” A pause, where his hands tighten about her shoulders, long fingers brushing the hollow of her throat. “Skittish little thing, aren’t you?”

She tries to turn around, face him, all her instincts screaming at her not to give him her back, remembering what happened last time he had his hands on her. But he holds her still. Not touching her apart from her shoulders, but she senses the warmth of him nonetheless. Feels the puffs of his breaths on her neck where it’s exposed by her braid.

She’s exhausted, unsure if she’s been sleeping or hallucinating these past few weeks. Her mind is moving oddly, along convoluted, surreal paths. 

But she still tries to think, tries to untangle the kinks and knots in her head. He could have finished her ten times over while she stood transfixed by this vision above the abyss. He could have pushed her off the edge, could have shot her in the back. Slit her throat. Clearly he’s playing a longer game than just an easy kill. 

So she slides her fingers along the illusion of temporary, fragile safety, and stills. 

Settles. 

At least for now.

He seems to feel the change under his hands, and relaxes his grip. 

“How have you been, Deputy?” His voice warms her skin, and chills it too.

She answers his question with a question.

“So they’re real?”

A beat.

“What do you mean?” There is genuine curiosity around the edges of his voice.

She jerks her chin towards the dancing birds.

“The birds. They’re real? You see them too?”

“If they are...?”

He spins her around, takes a step closer and looks her in the face. What he sees makes him chuckle darkly, and she fights against goosebumps at the sound.

“My, being in my sister’s clutches seems to have taken quite the toll. Didn’t you know, prolonged exposure to the Bliss isn’t good for you. For your sanity. For your mind.”

He takes another step back and lets go of her. He’s wearing his long coat and some sturdy boots, and the wind is blowing his hair every which way. 

“Yes. Yes, they are real. They are right here, in front of us. And you’d do well to leave the Henbane for a while. Might be time, anyway. Been busy, haven’t you? Faith is growing rather...shrill.”

He’s right, and he’s wrong. She’d torn through the region, but any progress she and the Cougars had made felt fleeting, temporary. Unreal. Whatever they had done, the cult had pushed back twice as hard. Wherever they had gone, the cult had been there, too. 

And Faith has been singing in her head. Her mind is curving wrong, is still too _ soft _, and she struggles to bend it right. Even so, some of her innate ferocity pushes forward, helped along by twisted sympathy for the adopted Seed sister.

“Suppose you could just replace her, then. Rachel, Selena, Lana...what does it matter, right? Same name in the end.”

He shrugs, just a quick quirk of one shoulder. 

“I’ll agree she’s the latest in quite the line. But she’s also the best. Joseph is confident in her longevity.”

“And yours?” she asks, and she’s starting to come back to herself a little now, the sharp edges of him clearing her mind from the harshest vestiges of Faith’s Bliss. “Is he confident in yours?”

It’s a question meant as a threat, and he meets it with a smile that isn’t an answer. Words that might be, but also not.

“We’ve planned for the Collapse for a very long time.” He looks at her up and down, slowly. “You would have been a child when we first arrived here and started to work and build, that’s how long we’ve been doing this. We intend to save people, as many as we can. We intend to save _ ourselves. _ And you, you don’t want to listen. You come from outside and you only want to tear our work apart.”

“You torture and kill people!”

He disregards her, burns her accusation from the cold air with his terrible conviction. He puts his hand to her lower back instead, urges her in front of him. The Bliss is still making her docile enough to walk with him the few hundred yards down to the abandoned cabin where she’s been staying. 

A small part of her enjoys the warmth of his hand through her shirt. She had happened to see the dancing birds through a cracked window and left the cabin without her coat. She’d been intent only on getting closer to their secret, and now she's so cold that she’s trembling. 

He steps inside ahead of her as if he owns the place, and it occurs to her that perhaps he does. He turns around once in the single room, takes in the bullet holes and the accusatory graffiti and the overturned, broken furniture.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he says blandly.

She bristles, even though she knows he’s only trying to get a reaction, trying to get her to give him a small opening just big enough to tear wide apart.

“Your people. Not me. And hell only knows what happened to the sap that lived here.” She jerks her chin towards old, dark stains on the wooden walls and floor, and he just shrugs, moves slowly around the small, drab space.

“How did you find me this time?”

A belated question, and one that she suspects will go unanswered.

And indeed he just hums low in his throat as he ignores it, and she likes that, grabs at it, because her anger is leading her back to herself.

He sits down, somehow as home on a rickety old chair in a godforsaken, drafty cabin as he had been by her campfire deep in the woods. He pulls out a book that she recognises as The Book of Joseph from his inner coat pocket, nods towards her.

“Did you read the book I left you?”

Absentmindedly she looks at his tattooed fingers slide across his own copy. It’s smaller than the other ones she’s seen, than the one he left her, it’s pocket-sized, which she supposes is rather the point. It’s also lumpy and misshapen. Perhaps water damaged, which would make sense, she thinks, considering how often he could be found knee deep in the river.

“Burned it without reading.”

She can see how rage flares in his eyes and how he tightens his fists around his book then, an involuntary and _ true _ reaction, at odds with the calm, measured preacher he pretends to be. The real him is leaking through the cracks of a facade that likely was faulty and weak from the very beginning, and with her emotions coerced free by Bliss she can admit to herself that she _ loves _ it.

“Yes,” she says, “I like this better. This is _ you _ , isn’t it? The preacher, the baptist, the _ immerser..._those are all lies. False. Not you.”

He says nothing to her taunting, but spins the book around and around in his hands, almost compulsively. She can tell that he’s trying to rein himself in again. She’s disappointed. She would have welcomed a physical fight with him, knuckles in bone, nails in skin, even though she’s too weak right now to stand any real chance.

“What’s your name, Deputy?”

She scoffs and laughs then, and the sound is ugly. 

“As if you all don’t know. _ Nancy _ must have told you.”

He smiles easily. His eyes are crinkling, his teeth are white, and she sees straight through it all. He’s not calm again. He’s just pretending to be. He wears masks like real, human skin.

“You’re right. She did. But I want it from you.”

It’s juvenile, of course, but she feels so impotent and not giving him what he wants is a little bit of power.

“No. I give my name to friends.”

A long-suffering sigh that rings false.

“Very well then.”

He stands smoothly from the chair, walks over to the bed and picks up her pack and her coat, thrusts them into her arms where she stands in the middle of the floor. 

“Time for you to leave. Get out of the Henbane for a while.” He walks towards the door. “I’ll see you again soon.”

She’s furious at being pushed around, told what to do, forced into such close proximity with an enemy. She’s furious at being the one left behind.

The need to take back control is urgent.

“I won’t give you another _ second _ again unless you let me see Hudson. Let me see that she’s not hurt.”

He stops, and the grin he gives her over his shoulder is positively ravenous.

“Oh, I think that could be arranged.”

Then he walks out the door and she stands looking after him, holding her belongings tight.

Shivering.


	3. A Flight of Swallows

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to Unquiet_Grave, for proofreading, editing, suggesting and sending me links to weird music videos I never realised I would love.
> 
> I assume you all have checked out her stories by now, because they’re fucking great. You have, haven’t you? She’s got a Resident Evil story on the cooker right at this very moment that is so good I went out and bought the game. Go read!

_ She hears herself laugh. It’s funny, because he is as serious as she has ever seen him but she can’t stop giggling. _

_ Or maybe it’s not funny at all. _

_ Her emotions are not separate entities anymore, and she can't make sense of the tangle. Nothing, nothing makes sense. _

_ Only killing him does, she’s sure of it. _

_ She goes for his ribs next, hits so hard the force of it reverberates up her arm into her shoulder. She enjoys how his lips go white, how he falls sideways. She’d noticed him holding his left side earlier, figured he’d injured himself there in the crash, and now she hopes she punctured a lung. _

_ Mostly, she just wants to feel bones break under her fist, wants to feel his skin tear, wants to see his marrow exposed to the freezing air. _

_ Perhaps she’ll find something true about him in there. Perhaps she can read his marrow like tea leaves. _

**Chapter 3: A Flight of Swallows**

The third time she sees him she breaks his nose.

She’s been waiting for him to show up, is deliberately camping out as close to his ranch as she dares to make it easier for him to get to her. She’d been allowing the guards on his property glimpses of her, hoping it would make him come sooner. It’s too cold to sleep outside - she thinks chances are good that she’ll wake up covered in frost in the morning. She can smell it on the dark air, hear the silence that precedes a freezing night. 

She hopes his scouts, or whatever means he employs to unerringly find her, are still good at their job. She’s got rage to expend, and no chill can temper it.

When he finally walks into the light of her fire she’s ready, and she pounces. Is up and across to him before he’s even had a chance to flash her a victorious smile, and she does so enjoy the crunch of bone under her fist.

“What?” he laughs, his blood running into his mouth. He doesn’t bother to wipe it away, and his lips stains red. “You wanted to see her. I arranged it.”

“You know damn fucking well that’s not what I meant!”

She’s screaming into his face, and it only makes him laugh harder. 

“Oh, don’t be mad, Deputy. You did so well. You know, I peeked back into the room and you shuffling along the floor on that chair was quite something. I hope you didn’t hurt yourself too badly on the stairs. And, you know, the _ rest_.”

She is, in fact, hurt. She’s an abstract painting of bruises and wounds, framed by a couple fractured ribs, but what else is new? She’s used to shoving pain and injuries to the back of her mind by now, and this moment is no different. 

In fact, she can feel rage settling firmer around her now, a barbed cloak clinging to her bones, numbing all the hurt. She launches at him again and he lets her come, takes a hit to his solar plexus before he decides that he’s done playing. When she next throws a punch, he grabs her arm and uses her momentum to spin her forward and around, then throws her to the ground. 

Frozen leaves crunch underneath, pain from her ribs paralyses her, and the stars, the stars are cold and fierce through the treetops. She’s almost certain they are real.

It’s a peculiar moment, still and tucked snugly right next to reality. Quiet. She can’t even hear her own breaths.

He follows her down and straddles her. Holds her arms behind her head, presses her wrists down into the freezing ground. His warm blood drips onto her cheeks. Tears of iron. And she had wished for this, hadn’t she, that he would let go of his false personas, his masks. Now he’s laid bare above her, he laughs with fury and madness and delight, and she thinks that it’s exquisite. 

It’s involuntary; an instinctive, primal reaction. 

Hunger.

One wrath feeds another, becomes a piercing feedback loop. For a moment she feels as though she’s surges upwards towards him, tries to meet him in the clear air between their faces. He feels something too, she can tell by the eclipse in his eyes, how his hips for a second grind down into hers. The need to touch, to stay connected.

To _ feed._

There’s something ugly, something beautiful, something shiny and slender running between them. A copper suture. Beating hearts. Rushing blood, connecting veins.

She’s never felt anything like this. She’s terrified. She’s repulsed.

She doesn't want to move away from him. 

Then sound returns to her again, and she can hear her breath, can hear his. She can hear the wind shiver and the sky whisper. She can hear the forest sleeping all around her, yes, the slumber matches something inside her.

But she, she’s awakening now, even as nature lies fallow all around her.

“Are you calm, Deputy? Will you behave?” 

His voice is guttural, his fingers on her wrists as hard as if he’s trying to break through to her arteries, leave the swirls from his fingerprints on her blood. 

And he stays where he is, keeps holding her down, an awful, irresistible weight on top of her. 

“You fight me, _ us_, so fiercely. Is it really, truly so hard for you to swallow that we might be right? That Joseph speaks the truth? That what we’re doing is ultimately for _ good_?”

“Get away from me,” is her answer to his question.

He leans further down towards her instead, and his breath is urgent against her lips, his blood warm on her cheek.

“I’ll _ make _ you swallow it. You’ll see. You’ll swallow it all down, every last bit of it, and then you’ll come to us.”

“Never,” she whispers. She means it, even if it isn’t very loud.

He laughs silently, just a whoosh of air moving her hair, then releases her and stands. She follows him up, picks leaves and twigs and looming defeat out of her hair as she faces him.

His shirt has come untucked from his jeans in their struggle, ridden up under his open coat, and on his left side, just above the waist of his low-slung jeans, she sees a tattooed barn swallow. Not like the ones she’d seen on Joseph’s chest. This one is entirely stylised, made out of wild black swirls describing intense movement. Indeed, the flickering light from her fire make it seem as though it soars and dives on his hip, tries to set flight from his skin.

A flash and a stutter, and suddenly she remembers swallows flying in and out of her grandparent’s barn, somewhere far away from here, sometime long ago. A disjointed piece of a memory, wildly out of place. She doesn’t understand its presence or importance here, and tries to dislodge it out of her mind.

He’s watching her face, head tilted to the side, eyes dancing with a need for violence. 

“You are fooling no one, don’t you know that?”

She’s struggling to follow his thoughts around now, tripped up by flashbacks in sepia and the ancient feeling he’s awoken deep inside her hindbrain. 

“What?”

“You are but one small little thing. We don’t fool ourselves that we can keep every single inhabitant safe inside Hope County. Misguided people can and likely _ will _ slip through, out, especially if they travel on their own. So could you. Yet you stay. Why is that, I wonder?”

The expression on his face makes it clear that he is wondering about no such thing at all. He knows, or thinks he knows, and she hates him and she wants to punch him again.

“You’ve got nothing to go back to, do you? 

She clenches her fists because they are _ itching._

“We’re not in your bunker anymore. Stop trying to get me to confess.”

He steps closer, and she backs away. He hasn’t made any attempts to right his clothing, and his nose is still bleeding freely. His eyes flit, and there’s a tick along his left jawline. She’s undone something inside him tonight.

Pity only that he’s undone her in return.

“But it’s what I do. It’s who I am.”

“No it’s not. It’s not who you are,” she answers and she’s never been so sure of anything in her life. The confessor is just another skin, another veil. Not tailored and stitched to suit him, it’s awkward about his frame.

“Oh?” he mocks, and takes one step closer. Then another. “What am I then?”

She stops her retreat. 

“I honestly don’t know.” Her voice is small, and she speaks the truth. She has no name for him.

He lunges for her and she thinks he will hurt her and he does. He kisses her, hard, just teeth, then his tongue touches hers and it’s _life_ she can taste, a beating pulse, but she’s not sure if it’s his or hers. His hands are in her hair and his hips moves against hers and the _sound _echoing between them, she’s never heard anything like it.

He moves back before she can bite, then dodges another of her fists and her knee towards his groin.

“I just wanted to see what it would feel like,” he says, grins at her, and there is blood on his teeth and fierce, unchecked, _ wild _ insanity in his eyes. Yes, his soul is gossamer in places, and she can see the madness and fire clean through. 

“Until next time, little hellion,” he says and melts into the shadows. 

“Fuck you,” she hisses, and she can hear his unearthly chuckle from within the blackness as he leaves. 

His blood is on her tongue. 

It tastes _ delicious_.


	4. A Tiding of Magpies

_ He stands again and smiles at her through blood. Raises his fists, asks her to dance._

_ She has always envied him his ability to play with pain, make it flow in strange paths - into the bodies of others, back to him again. One of their differences: he thrives on hurt, she only tolerates it. _

_ That could be her downfall now and she refuses to let that happen. She’s smaller and lighter but she’s angrier, and she feels his cheekbone give under her fist. _

_ His Book of Joseph falls out of his pocket as he heavily hits the ground. It slides away down the icy slope with the force of his fall. _

_ She sees loose pages scattering, flying away with the wind, and she wants to cry for him. _

_ She kicks him while he’s down instead. _

**Chapter 4: A Tiding of Magpies**

The fourth time she’s sure he will kill her.

She’s just crossed into the Henbane from Holland Valley, passing through on her way to the Whitetails, and she’s carefully scoping the perimeter of an abandoned diner. Though not carefully enough, because when she turns around he’s suddenly right _ there_. He grabs her, shoves her through the broken door, and she gets hazy snapshots of half-eaten dinners and cold coffees and lives left behind as he drags her across the scuffed linoleum floor.

Blearily she thinks that he really must be beyond furious to cross into Faith’s territory just to get at her. 

He hurls her up on the counter at the back and immediately grabs her in a stranglehold. Salt and pepper shakers fall to the floor, her scrabbling fingers find no other purchase than old napkins and dogeared menus, and he chokes her so hard she floats through deep space inside her head. The only lightsource is from the old jukebox, still plugged in, and he looks monstrous in neon, his teeth bared.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” She can barely wheeze the words out, but right now she’s got nothing but defiance and adrenaline.

“_Give. Me. Back. My home,”_ he hisses, and squeezes harder as she adds to his collection of her nail imprints. Maybe they will eventually become as permanent as his tattoos, etched deep and true into his epidermis. His light eyes flare with barely restrained savagery, and she realises suddenly that she is genuinely scared.

This marks the first time he’s attempted to truly hurt her in _ private_, and the strangeness of it rattles her. Perhaps she had come to see his public treatment of her as nothing but show; ͏one of his choreographed theatre plays. Perhaps she had started to believe that the mostly civil way he approaches her when it’s just them is what’s _ real._

Now the cognitive dissonance unmoors her. 

He eases his grip on her jugular enough for her to speak again. She coughs, tries to draw breaths through the pressure of his fingers.

“You know I can’t do that,” she gasps. 

He growls, crowds impossibly closer, she can feel his heartbeat, can see a hairline scar run through his upper lip. She can see touches of grey at his temples, silver streaked in queer patterns. As if his thoughts had become too unbearable to be contained inside his skull, as if they had burst forth like tangled spiderwebs.

“Withdraw, or rivers of blood will be shed. I promise you that. Perhaps not yours, but your friends’. I’ll kill them all, and I swear to you that I won’t regret it for a second. I’d _ enjoy _ it.”

She looks up into his eyes, and she believes him absolutely, wholly. He _ would _ enjoy it, and he would draw it out. He would glory in the pain and the screams. 

“Are you always this melodramatic? Screaming walls, rivers of blood?” She’s grandstanding, and it’s all empty. Taking his ranch had been one small success in a long line of setbacks for her and the Resistance, and the cost in blood had been steep. Now she fears it will be steeper still.

They—_ she _ —had taken something of _ his, _ after all.

He huffs and lets up his grip on her throat, but he continues to hold her firm on the counter. Slides his hands to her shoulders, stands between her thighs and paints her face with his rage. And she, she feels strangely alive. Used to feeling almost nothing, now fright has made her feel full to the brim with kinetic energy.

It needs to be _ expended_. And it seems violence and lust are intrinsically linked. 

For them both. 

“Are you going to kiss me again?” She grabs the question out of thin air, catches it as it flies past on its way between his eyes and her lips.

He doesn’t move closer, holds himself still, though she can feel how much it costs him. He’s a man of restless movement and ruthless action; she doesn’t think that patience or restraint comes naturally to him. 

“Do you want me to?”

She’s surprised that he’s seemingly asking permission. Then she realises: he wants her to damn herself. 

“I don’t know.”

That’s a lie. She wants to feel what she felt the last time they met, when he held her down, and when he kissed her. She needs to know if it was nothing but falsehood. 

Or, if it was _ real_. 

He knows as well. He’s a master at reading people, thrives on extracting confessions and secrets, feasts on little ticks and giveaways.

“That’s not quite true, is it, Deputy?”

Yet still he waits, waits for her to say it. 

_ Fuck _ him.

“Yes. _ Yes_, I want you to kiss me again.”

That’s all the permission he needs. He pulls her roughly forward by her hips so she balances right on the edge of the counter, gets her closer to him, then his lips are on hers. His beard scratches her and his fingers are too hard about her jaw, and oh, the _ storm_. He kisses the same way he hurts people; violent and cruel and overflowing with passion. He doesn’t give much quarter, rules over her with his tongue, but he allows her to lick into his mouth, to run her hands through his hair. She delights in the taste of him, in the brimstone and anger, in the tendrils of madness running between them and finding slippery purchase on skin.

Oh yes, this _ is _ real, she’s sure of it now, but she doesn’t want it to be. She thinks it would be safer as an illusion. The combination of fear and desire is too dangerous; too _ addictive_. 

He leaves her mouth, uses her hair as a tether to hold her still and expose her neck to him. The feel of beard and teeth and lips travelling down her throat pulls a whine from deep inside her, then a loud keen when he clamps down on her pulse. He gulps down her heartbeats, and his free hand strokes the soft skin just above the waistband of her jeans, his fingers sliding further up under her shirt, splaying on her abdomen.

It’s the sound of his coat hitting the linoleum that brings her back to herself.

“Enough. Enough now.”

She’s not sure she means it, but she puts her hands on his shoulders and pushes him back a step, and he heeds her with a crooked smile. His hair is disheveled, his pupils blown with avarice, movements lazy and unhurried.

“Oh actually, not _ quite_,” he murmurs.

He steps closer again, rips her old plaid shirt apart, buttons scattering across the floor. Exposes her black sports bra and her skin.

“I trust you heard me earlier. Your hide, it belongs to me and my mantle now. Though I might just keep it _ on _ you.” He bends, and nips the skin just above her rushing heart, pulls it between his teeth and sucks viciously. The proximity to her heart pushes blood to the little burst vessels that much faster, and soon a large mark blooms, unfurls its petals under his teeth. 

Then he releases her, steps back. Admires.

“There. Almost better than the tattoo gun. More personal. Though believe me when I say that if you don’t give up my home I’ll brand you with fire or blade next time.”

She ignores his threats, and gingerly touches his face, runs a light finger along the line of his nose. It’s no longer perfectly straight.

“I like your new nose. It suits you.”

She enjoys provoking him, perhaps a little too much. He seems wont to agree.

“Careful now, or I’ll find a way to return the favour. I won’t even look for an excuse.” He glances around, as if he notices their surroundings for the very first time. Maybe he does. She thinks it likely that he hurried after her in an unseeing rage. ”You ought to get going. Faith’s got patrols everywhere.” He lifts her off the counter, sets her down on the floor, close, close to him. “As for that, did I not tell you to stay away from the Henbane, Deputy?”

She tries to fix her shirt, but gives up. It’s ruined. She ties it together by the waist, and wonders how she’ll hide his mark. Though she supposes that the whole point is that she can’t.

“Oh, I’m only passing through on my way somewhere else.”

He smiles sardonically, shakes his head. 

“I sincerely doubt the Whitetails will be much of an improvement for you.”

She tries to straighten her unruly hair, gives it up as a cause as lost as her shirt. Pats herself down to make sure all her weapons are still in place.

“You might not have noticed, but this entire county is detrimental to my health.”

He holds up his hands.

“You don’t see _ me _ trying to kill you, do you?”

“No you…I’m not sure what you’re trying to do,” she says thoughtfully, looks at him and wishes she could open his skull and take a peek inside, sort through all the thoughts in his brain. Though she suspects they are too jumbled and snarled to ever make sense of, untangle. 

He only smiles at her and walks through the half-light towards the door.

“Stay here while I make sure it’s clear.”

She slides down on the floor while she waits. Sits with her back against the counter and her knees drawn up against her chest and considers how far she is falling, and how fast.

She sees his personal Book Of Joseph, the one he’s carrying around with him, fallen halfway out of his coat pocket where it lies discarded on the floor. Idly she picks it up and discovers why it’s so lumpy and misshapen.

It’s full of annotations and haphazard scrawls in the margins. Full of glued or just slid-in notes, photos, drawings. Tattoo artworks. Some she’s seen on his arms, others are perhaps hidden underneath his clothes. She comes across a sketch of the swallow on his hip. She skims notes, between him and his brothers, between him and his mind. The handwriting is hurried, the thoughts tumbling and falling every which way across the pages. There’s a blurry Polaroid, much thumbed, of three boys looking warily at the camera. Perhaps they weren’t yet monsters then, but it’s impossible for her to tell.

She flicks some more pages and comes across a sketch of her own face, perhaps as a tattoo design. It’s her curls and wide mouth, her light eyes and shadows and cloven expression, perfectly captured in ink lines and chiaroscuro. She thinks that she looks almost beautiful this way, with how he’s rendered her, pulled her likeness out from within the fibers of an old napkin in bold, sparse strokes.

“That’s _ private._ It’s not for you to see.”

She looks up at the sound of his voice and sees him standing above her. She’s been so entranced by the book—a scrapbook, a notebook, a _ diary_, not a bible—that she hadn’t heard him come back inside the diner. She looks at the barely checked anger on his face and wonders why she feels like such a _ betrayer _ when really, back in reality, he is nothing but her enemy. She stands quickly, not wanting his temper cutting the air above her.

“Well here I thought you _ wanted _ me to read this goddamned book.”

She uses flippancy to hide her unease. He says nothing, but grabs the wrist of the hand holding the book so hard she’s got no option but to let it drop to the floor. He bends and carefully retrieves it. Rights the loose pages, slides it back into his pocket. Then he pulls her towards the door.

They step outside, and after the eternal twilight of the diner the afternoon light is too harsh on her eyes. Dead leaves and trash whirl across the empty parking lot, carried by a frigid wind. There’s the tang of petrol and blood in the air, there are distant gunshots, and she feels a sudden urge for the forest. For quiet, for clean smells.

Her bag is sitting on the tarmac, and a couple of magpies are atop it, drawn to the buckles. Hunting for shiny things, treasures, with tilted heads and intelligent eyes warily tracking them. 

He shoos them away and picks it up for her.

“You dropped this.”

The magpies sit perched up in the gutter to the diner now, and their warning call is scratching at something in her brain. She shivers, returns her attention to John as she grabs the bag from him and slides it onto her back.

“I dropped it because you _ attacked _ me.”

“I was angry. Still am. _ Angrier._”

He steps closer, and she flinches. His fingertips strokes her cheek, fleeting, touching on gentle. But his voice is gravel. She’s been nothing but a disappointment to him today.

“Go now. I can’t bear to see your face any longer.”

She obeys immediately, turns towards the Whitetails and leaves, and she thinks that it doesn’t matter anyway, because he’s carrying her face around with him everywhere. 


	5. A Lamentation of Swans

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks as always to Unquiet_Grave for proofing, editing and most importantly supporting, always with the speed of greased lightning <3

_ He grabs her leg after the first kick and viciously pulls her down next to him. Then he rolls atop her, pins her with his knees to her shoulders, and punches her in the face, exactly where he hit her before. He’s always fought dirty, just like her. It appears several head injuries haven’t warped his aim any. _

_She struggles against unconsciousness and shooting pain, and he leans forward to whisper in her ear. Loose snow falls from his hair into hers._

_“You are so stubborn, and you are so fierce. I love that the best about you.”_

_He kisses her cheek, gently, and she doesn’t turn her face away._

_“But you’ve always been wrong. Always.”_

_She arches her spine, screams, and manages to throw him off her. _

_Then she lands a side-handed blow across his jugular._

_God, she really needs him to be _ ** _quiet_ ** _ now._

**Chapter 5: A Lamentation of Swans **

The fifth time she sees him she ends up in his backseat.

She’s bathing in a pond in the woods when he finds her. She’s spent weeks in Jacob’s cages and she’s filthy and starved and traumatised. She’d crawled back across the border to Holland Valley earlier that day, covered in blood and viscera, wondering all the while if she’s even still alive. Conditioning nestles somewhere deep in her brain, a malignant tumour, incurable and placidly evil.

She wishes she could cut it straight out.

It’s a day of inexplicable Indian summer, warm air and sunshine contrasting oddly with naked trees; a last confused tumble by nature before winter. But the dark water is ice cold, chilled after weeks of true, frostbitten autumn, and she welcomes the breathless pain of it. It cleanses her, frees her of Jacob, from the insidious touch of his cruelty.

She needs it, needs it to know that she’s still alive.

She swims among fading lily pads and there are two swans gliding just nearby. Pure white of plumage, sleek and jet-eyed. Achingly beautiful against the blackness of the water, against the backdrop of the forest made out of shadows and the darkest of greens. They’re only passing by, she knows, on their way somewhere else for winter, and she longs to follow them through the skies when they leave. 

She swims smoothly and fluidly, careful not to bother them, and it’s the most peace she’s felt for the longest time. She knows of course it’s temporal, fleeting enough to slip through her fingers even as she swims, yes, she can feel it trailing behind her in the water as she goes.

Peace is not hers to hold, but this moment is enough for now.

She turns on her back and floats on the water. Her arms and legs outstretched, ears under the surface, distorting the wind through the Ponderosas into a strange, secretive murmur. Then she allows herself to sink downwards, enjoys the water closing over her face, the feeling of weightlessness and freedom. When the burn in her lungs grows too much to bear she glides upwards again. 

She surfaces and sees him standing right by the water’s edge, watching her. Despite the warmth he’s wearing his coat with the collar upturned, and his hair is longer than when she saw him last, it’s brushing his cheekbones. His stance is wide legged, easy, but he’s betrayed by the fists clenched by his sides.

She stills, treads water, meets his eyes squarely. They are almost as black as the swans’, she can see barely any blue.

He’s shown up without warning. Again. He never bothers to radio her privately, his broadcasts to her are for everyone. But their meetings are just for them. 

She swims a couple of strokes closer to him, and he walks a few steps into the water towards her. He looks like he isn’t breathing when he comes to a standstill again, and she holds her breath with him because she knows how he feels.

She wonders, not for the first time, if he’s got some finely honed, near supernatural instinct for her. If this thread of copper that she senses between them serves as a conductor, if he can feel the vibrations of her heartbeats down it and follow them to find her.

But perhaps it doesn’t matter how. He’s here. And it’s curious to her how her nakedness doesn’t bother her, how she doesn’t care that he sees her so exposed. She is entirely laid bare before him. If her confessions were written on her skin he would have them all. The sins, too. 

“Why do you look at me like that?” 

His voice is low, gritty, tightly reined. She wonders how so much can be held inside it; she wonders at all of _ him._

“I’m curious about this monster you chose to become,” and she can see his cock straining against his jeans, heavy, hard, laid out towards his hip. It’s an easy, sure, _ right _ thing to do to swim towards him where he stands knee deep in the water, raise up before him and palm him through the thick denim. Breathe against his lips, slide a hand into his hair. 

He’s not immobile for long. A second, maybe two, then his hands are on her wet skin and he pulls her forcefully into him, opens her mouth with his tongue. She enjoys being slammed against the hard lines of him, somehow the blow forces loose the puppet strings nailed to her skin from her time in Jacob’s cages. Though it’s not lost on her that she is simply replacing one kind of possession with another. 

She can’t bring herself to care.

She continues palming him, unstrings the groans within his mouth, plucks them out into daylight one by one. She can’t get enough of the taste of him, his tongue, his hands, his hair, the dizzying smell of insanity. She shivers into him, tries to climb inside him. Tries to climb _ up _ him, and he helps her.

Her teeth chatter against his lips, wet skin and wet hair and premonition chilling her, and he shrugs off his long coat and drapes it over her shoulders, then grabs her face in both hands and continues kissing her. And she can’t freeze like this, can she, with him before and around her, with the damnable heat of him singeing all her thoughts away. 

He puts his forehead against hers, breathes so harshly he moves her hair with each breath.

“I _ need…”_

“Yes.” She’s sure, so _ sure_, and that terrifies her.

He grabs her arm and leads her out of the water, back onto the grass, his coat dragging behind her on the surface like a cloak. The swans set flight then, raise up from the water, perhaps disturbed by their movements, by so much fervour burning in the air. They fly so close that she could swear she can feel a wing beat violently against her nape, featherlight, unforgiving.

A portend slipping away from her immediately. 

He takes the coat off her, spreads it on the ground, then pulls her down on it, follows. On their knees before each other, breast against breast, and she unbuttons his shirt, spreads it open. His hands are hard on her shoulders, her neck, his fingers pressing indents into her skin.

“I don’t think I can be...gentle.”

The word is awkward in his mouth, like it has no business rolling off his tongue. Perhaps this is the first time it’s lived there. 

“Then don’t be.”

That unleashes him, truly, and he all but throws her backwards, follows after with teeth and fingers. He bites another mark over her heart, to replace the one long since faded, and his fingers travel down to find the centre of her, playing her strings skilfully, ruthlessly. She pushes herself into his hand even as she tries to unbutton his jeans, scrabbles with shaky fingers over his belt buckle, breathes terrible want and delirium into the side of his neck.

“Please,” she murmurs when she finds his ear, “_please_.”

She frees him, finally, strokes him as he pushes three fingers inside her. She can feel her spine arch, she moves up into him as his beard scratches a trail down to her breasts, as he takes a nipple into his mouth and positions her hips for him with one hand.

“John.”

“Take a deep breath now.” And he pushes inside, merciless, as deep as he can possibly get. Branding her without knife or needle, and the breath he urged her to take dies in her throat. 

Up past his shoulder the treetops swirl into tunnel vision. She sees the swans circle through it once before they disappear into the sky and she thinks that she’s missed her chance now, missed her chance to go with them, trapped as she is down here. Under him. Then he pushes her deeper into the ground, pulls her legs up around his waist, and she forgets the swans, forgets everything but him. His face above her, his cock inside her, his hips moving to meet hers. His hooded eyes never letting her go, his lips drawn back in a snarl as he ruts into her.

He finds her lips again, slides his tongue into her mouth in time with his thrusts, then pushes himself up on his knees and pulls her hips up into his lap, splays her out like a reparation before him. He can see their coupling better this way, the way her breasts move, the way her hair tangles with the earth, how she swallows him over and over. And oh, she can see _ him._ The tattoos exposed to daylight, the scars, the muscles, the sheen of sweat, and his _ eyes._ It’s always night in his eyes.

“There. _ Yes_. You’re doing so well. You’re doing so well for me.”

Strangely it’s the praise from him pushing her over the edge, an explosion then an implosion sucking her into a wormhole of distorted pleasure. From somewhere far away, on the other side, she wonders about the physics involved in altering her mind and body like this. Is it even possible? 

He finishes just after, tall above her, neck thrown back, face to the sky. Hands clasping her hips in a bruising grip, holding her still for him as he empties inside her. Quiet, but the triumph in his eyes is loud.

Then he falls heavy on top of her, and she wraps herself around him, steals his heat, enjoys his heart beating against hers. 

After a while he stands, rights his clothes, offers her his hand.

“It’s too cold for you out here, wet as you are. Come.”

He leads her into the trees, his coat back around her shoulders, soaked hem moving against her ankles. She holds it closed over her chest, burrows into the collar, wrapped up in the smell of leather and him. Absentmindedly she slides her hand into the pocket, makes sure his book is still there. Still safe. 

They walk along an overgrown track until they reach one of the white cult trucks, parked half hidden in among the pines. He opens the door to the backseat, lifts her up and slides in after her. Pulls her into his lap, holds her against him.

She can’t comprehend how she can feel so safe and in so much danger at the same time.

He looks her over. She’s clean now, yes, but the marks from her stay in the Whitetails remain. There are new ones now, too. He chases along all of them, all the different hues, fingerpainting with her injuries. He draws too hard on the bruises from Jacob, like he’s trying to press them back into her skin. Erase all touches but his.

“Look at you,” he says, his voice a low rasp. “My brother really turned you inside out, didn’t he?”

“He put something in my head that I can’t get out. Ever.”

“I know.” He pulls her head back by her hair, forces her to meet his eyes. “I told you Jacob would treat you harshly. Why wouldn’t you listen? You’re to stay away from the Whitetails from now on. The Henbane too.”

He strokes his hands along the ugly bruises and welts on her back with the words. She’s having to fight against the urge to curl up against him, to sleep, to feel safe. Fight not to lose pieces of herself in his lap.

“What do you think this is? A negotiation of my surrender? We fuck, then hostilities magically cease?” 

He leans forward and nips at her throat, follows with a punishing hand. Steals air.

“Not quite. But you gave me something of yourself today, a large piece. Voluntarily. And I won’t let go of it.”

She needs to leave now, before it’s too late for her. She remembers the swan wings touching her nape, a warning, a prophecy hurtling through the air.

“I’m no one’s, John. I can’t stop what I’m doing here. It’s not right.”

His smile is unhurried, savage.

“You’re wrong.”

She grabs the door handle, and he’s faster than her, snatches her wrist and pulls her back into his chest. Speaks straight into her ear.

“I will eventually have you, all of you. I’ll chain you to my bed if I have to, where no one can see or touch you but me, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be _ safe_.”

She laughs, and she herself can hear how ugly it is, how hollow and thorny. 

“And from you?”

“Never,” he grins, and it’s the wildest she’s seen him yet.

She hops out of the truck and he lets her, sits back and watches her go. She strides naked and straight-backed in among the shadows of the trees. Away to find her filthy clothes, away to find her mind again. 

His spend running down the inside of her thighs.


	6. A Cast of Falcons

_ But of course he won’t stop talking. When has he ever stopped fucking _ ** _talking_**_? _

_“Were it Joseph here instead of me you’d just roll over, wouldn’t you? Tip your throat back and show him where to cut.”_

_His voice is choked with pain and lack of air but that’s scant comfort when his words are hurting her as much as they are._

_“Be quiet.”_

_“Listen to me, Ma…”_

_“Shut up! Don’t you call me that! Don’t you ever call me that again!” Her voice is a shriek, hysteric, senseless, and to her horror she can feel her eyes getting wet. She hopes it’s from blood. _

_He puts his hands up. She sees how they shake. She doesn’t understand how he’s even standing up._

_“Fine, _ _Deputy__.__”_

_She launches into him, scratches at his face, deep gouges into his cheeks, and they tumble backwards into the snow together._

**Chapter 6: A Cast of Falcons**

  
The sixth time she sees him she sees Joseph too.

She’d been captured planting explosives down the lumber mill, and now she’s tossed on the filthy floor of a van, tied hand and foot, at least two pairs of booted feet keeping her firmly down. Beaten quite black and blue before all that, too.

It had been but a moment’s distraction, her mind elsewhere, somewhere above the incessant November rain, beyond Hope County. High up and away.

Their dumb luck, her misfortune.

She’d been avoiding Holland Valley for a couple of weeks, flitting along the borders, darting into the regions with quicksilver speed before retreating again. She’d left behind a fitful, twitchy trail of destruction, no rhyme, no reason. A sullen reproach to John’s order, perhaps, but then she has never liked being told what to do.

Even so, his warning ringing clear, her memories of Jacob’s cages and Faith’s Bliss sharp and fuguelike at the same time…she has attempted to take care. Travel alone. Stay below the Heralds’ radar. Not stopping anywhere for long, always moving, always leaving. She’s in no doubt he can find her when and if he wants, but she has no intention of making it easy for him, and so far he has left her alone. But she’s tired now, exhausted. Tired of never standing still, tired of the rain, tired of this whole fucked up situation.

She _ misses _ him. And that is one confession she has no intention of ever letting him own. She’s already let him have enough, if not in words.

The van comes to a sudden, screeching standstill, rolling her against the back door. Before she can shake the pain out of her head she’s roughly tugged out. Tied as she is she falls to her knees in the mud, and squinting against the rain and dusk she tries to make sense of her surroundings.

_ Avaritia. Invidia. Ira. Tristitia. Luxuria. Gula. Superbia. _

And that fucking church. 

Joseph’s compound. Back where it all began.

She tries to get to her feet and fails. One of her captors hoists her up by her armpits, then he slices the rope around her ankles so she can walk. She lifts her wrists to the man with a hopeful waggle of her eyebrows and a bright smile, enjoys his snort, but her heart isn’t in the riling. She’s busy turning her situation over in her head.

She had thought for sure she would be delivered to Jacob. How very wrong.

How very dangerous.

She remembers Joseph from that first night, when her life overturned in the air and nosedived into a collision course with quicksand.

He had terrified and unmoored her then. She doesn’t want to think about what he could do to her now, when she’s even less sure of herself, when her identity has become such changeable, fluid thing. 

When she’s even less sure she’s _ good._

She’s got none of her weapons, her guards took them all, along with her pack and her coat. She wonders if she can defend herself against him with her bare hands.

Almost against her will she starts resisting the two men holding her with twin iron grips. She knows her chances of escaping this are nonexistent, but she wouldn’t be _ herself _ if she didn’t try. At least that much remains of the person that flew into Hope County one new lifetime ago.

A truck drives into the compound then, approaches through the falling darkness at dangerous speed. It skids to a halt near where she’s being dragged across the mud and the driver immediately jumps out and starts towards them through the driving rain.

John, with flaming eyes and knife edge movements and savagery in his smile, lit by the headlights from his truck.

“I’ll take it from here,” he tells her captors, and they fall back without question, allow him to wrap his fingers about her shoulder and walk her forward.

“What are you…” He takes a deep breath, looks her up and down, at her split lip, her black eye. Clenches his jaw. “This was careless of you,” he hisses in her ear, his long fingers digging into her shoulder so viciously she whimpers. “I don’t know if I can…”

They are interrupted then. 

“John.” 

Joseph, standing on the steps of his church, framed by the open doors. Light flickers strangely behind him, and she thinks of starving flames. He’s bare chested and lean, aviators distorting his eyes, and she wants to snort at him being shirtless in rain so cold it will soon become snow, but her disdain is swallowed by unease and shivers.

He looks at her, at John, and slowly inclines his head in greeting.

“To me, John,” he says, and the déjà vu gives her vertigo.

John leads her across, and she can feel his reluctance through her skin, in the way his fingers impossibly tighten about her shoulder, in his hot breath against her temple.

“Leave us,“ Joseph says once they reach him, and she can hear John’s teeth grinding from here, can feel it inside her own head. But he obeys, releases her and turns around. It hurts to see him walk away from her.

But she’s got no right to feel abandoned by him.

Joseph replaces John’s hand on her shoulder, then lets it slide slowly down until it reaches her lower back, where it urges her to move.

“With me, Deputy. Inside.”

He doesn’t take his hand off her until they are indoors and he releases her to shut the church doors. The sound of them closing behind her is one of finality, and she thinks of cages, she thinks of cells. She can’t stand feeling so trapped and enclosed.

She tries to regain some equilibrium, stands still studying the interior of this supposedly holy place. It looks different when it’s empty of people, but the deep disquiet she feels is the very same. 

She needs to get out of here.

He appears in front of her again, slides a wicked looking knife from a leg holster and smiles slightly at the way she flinches, rears back. With a raised eyebrow he indicates her bound wrists, and she raises her hands up between them, allows him to cut through the rope with one smooth, practiced movement. The side of the blade slides along her skin and she shivers.

But it’s worth it to no longer feel quite so wing-clipped.

When she’s free he traps her again in a different way. Clasps her wrists between his fingers and rubs them, as if he could eradicate the rope burn. It unsettles her even more. He is as tactile as his younger brother and in his own way twice as threatening, even though the touch he use is soft, gentle.

False. It’s _ false,_ because she senses the strength and brutal glee underneath, hot and keen. It emanates _ wrongness _, but she still wants to lean into it.

She takes a step back instead, and he releases her. They stand in the aisle between the pews, looking at each other. She’s dripping rainwater onto the wooden floor, and is vaguely surprised the drops don’t evaporate into steam the second they come into contact with this hellish place.

“You were brought here, to me, for a reason,” he begins. “I wanted another chance to talk with you.” He pauses, and takes a step towards her. She takes a step back, and he looks pleased. “I would ask you again, Deputy, to consider your path. Walk with us, not against.”

She shakes her head, wraps her arms around herself, but stands straight. 

“I won’t. How _ can _ I? You’ve strung up mutilated bodies all across the county. You’ve draped them in barbed wire and Bliss.” 

He gravely inclines his head, as if he’s taking her objection into serious consideration, and she can feel her fingers turn to claws. 

“A necessary evil, though I’ll agree perhaps needlessly garish. But the Collapse _ is _ happening, and I would rather see you safe with us than turned to ashes. Or slain by our hands before then,” he adds, and lets one hand slide slowly to his leg holster. “And you must understand, Deputy, that a lot of people look to me for protection. And I do intend on protecting them all, using whatever means available to me.”

She can feel her lips curl back, baring her teeth. The reaction of a trapped animal, but she can’t stop herself, it’s an instinctive thing. 

“‘A lot of people’? You’ve got a following like this because you prey on people’s deepest terrors, feed their worst weaknesses._ ‘The devil knows our fears, he told all his friends’,” _ she quotes sarcastically _ , _ and he chuckles.

“Would you compare me to Lucifer himself, or am I merely one of his distant acquaintances?” he asks, amusement warming his voice.

She shakes her head, knows she’s getting nowhere, keeps going anyway. 

“Take Joh...your brother. You’ve never attempted to abate his bloodlust. You’ve nourished it. You’ve _ sanctioned _ it. You’ve unleashed him on people. Do you think you’re saving his soul this way? You’re _ not_. You’re damning it further. How can your means _ ever _ be justified, no matter the end?”

He stops, tilts his head and studies her closely. 

“You hide eloquence underneath your barbed, thuggish demeanour, and you slip up and let it out when you’re afraid. Not merely a violent grunt, are you? No, of course you’re not. To answer your question: in the face of the end of the world, morals and righteousness must take a backseat. What matters is saving souls. If extinguishing a few means saving more, then so be it.”

He smiles slightly, and a shard of vindictiveness creeps into his carefully solemn gaze. 

“You are no stranger to taking lives yourself, Deputy. And do you not justify your killings with that they are...for the greater good? Necessary in the face of a perceived threat?”

She doesn’t answer because she can’t. Her protest breaks apart in her throat and the shards cut into her windpipe. She feels like she ought to draw breaths on blood, not air.

At her silence he keeps walking towards her, point made, and she finds herself unsteadily backing up the steps to the shabby podium from where he preaches. The candles and the television screens cast everything in a confusing light: here warm and flickering, there cold and artificial.

He follows, sure and agile, and soon she is against the back wall, underneath that wretched Eden’s Gate symbol, and there is nowhere else for her to go. He comes to a stop right in front of her, tall above her, makes her feel so _ small. _She clenches her fists, raises her chin, attempts one more act of rebellion before he swallows her soul whole.

“Throughout millennia countless gods have died. So will yours.“

He smiles and pushes his aviators up on his head. It raises goosebumps on her skin, turns her spine to a slithering thing of ice.

“No,” he says gently, and it’s final. No discussion, no quarter. It’s impossible for her to fight such belief, she burns in it instead, burns in his eyes. She thinks she might become seared into his irises, a smudge of black tainting his blue. 

He steps closer, straight into her space, and takes her face between his hands. She is almost longing for the Bliss that has shielded her the last time he held her like this, because now she is completely naked before him. 

His breath is hot on her cheeks, and his fingers hard on her temples, like he’s trying to breathe faith into her, like he’s trying to press belief inside her head. She’s discombobulated, adrift, she’s falling freely into his eyes, and she understands suddenly how he is _ where _ he is. 

How he’s gathered a following, how he’s built this askew little world, far away. 

His hands go from her temples to her shoulders to her waist. He steps impossibly closer, the entire length of his body pressed against hers.

“You are ours.”

He breathes it against her lips, and her toes curl and her breath hitches and it takes her a second before she recognises the words he speaks into her mouth. 

“_No one is coming to save you.”_

There is a primal hunger in his voice now, a hunger that will eat her alive.

“Tell me your name.”

There’s no denying him. His breath in her mouth takes power of her tongue, his knee between her thighs shortens her breaths and leaves her lightheaded, soaring along the outlines of him.

“Mallory.”

It’s not news to him, of course it isn’t, and she can tell by his thoughtful hum, whispering inside her throat. 

“Mallory. Mal. _ Mal_,” he muses against her lips. “Of course.”

And she knows what he means. 

Slowly he slides his fingers along the inside of her arms where she’s pressing them back into the wall. Slides them down, but he doesn’t take her hands, he encircles her wrists instead. So much more intimate and controlling, to hold her rushing veins, the fragile, delicate bones beneath. Feel how he is affecting her, and he smiles, and it’s genuine and delighted.

He takes both her wrists in one hand, lets the other, the one with the rosary, travel back up to her face again. He goes for her lips, drags the rosary between them, bead for bead. His face is as severe as a stone tablet, a raptor diving for the kill. But his pupils are dilated with lust. 

Then, suddenly, he stops.

“No,” he murmurs, and takes a step back. “Not quite for me, are you, though I could make it so if I wished.”

He releases her wrists with one last unhurried stroke of a thumb across her pulse. 

“I fear my brother is growing anxious. I should see you returned to him.”

_ He knows, _she thinks. 

“At least for now,” he adds, and she never knew fear could make one so hazy. 

With yet another gentle press of his hand against her lower back he leads her back down the aisle towards the doors. She walks so fast it’s almost a run, but he has no problems keeping up with her. It is she who throws the doors open, steps outside into the rain with gulping breaths, trying to take in as much air as possible. She sees John waiting opposite, standing in the shadows under the dripping awning of one of the cabins.

Joseph comes to a stop next to her, beckons to John with one hand. 

“John. Why don’t you show Mallory her quarters? Faith will come and see her in the morning.”

She doesn’t miss the expression on John’s face, the darkness, the anger. She had told Joseph, not _ him._

He inclines his head to Joseph and leads her away, in among the buildings. When they are on the backside, out of sight, he hurls her up against a wall. He takes her in, her blown pupils and her flush, and she’s never quite seen his face like this, so sharp and so deep in the hunt.

“You are _ mine._ Not his.”

And he kisses her, takes her mouth like he’s got some kind of right. Like he’s trying to erase his brother’s touch from her. She’s not sure it can be done, but she lets him try. The rain can’t wash away Joseph’s touch, nor can fire, but maybe John can. 

When he realises that she’s offering no resistance, that she’s responding to him, he redoubles his efforts. It’s like he’s trying to _ eat _ her before Joseph can. Her cut lip starts bleeding again and her blood mingles on their tongues. He slides his hands under her wet shirt, under her bra, finds her breasts and brushes her nipples with his thumbs. Steps closer, pushes his hips into hers.

“I need to have you.” 

His voice is raspy with the need to fuck, to best, to _ claim. _

“I want you to.” 

Her voice is barely there.

It’s a fast, desperate thing, up against the wall, the back of her head banging against the wood, his fingers leaving bruises on her thighs. It’s over almost before it begins, and they muffle their screams into each other’s mouths. 

“If he asked you to give me to him, would you?” she whispers into the side of his throat afterwards. 

He doesn’t answer. 

“Come,” he says instead. “I’ll get you inside before someone sees us. I believe Joseph’s had one of the cabins prepared for you.”

She’s put in _ Luxuria, _with heavy bars in front of the windows, and she knows then that Joseph definitely knows.

* * *

In the middle of the night he helps her escape. He comes to her with her possessions and leads her to the back of the compound, urges her to run for the treeline. He doesn’t meet her eyes as she slips away, and she doesn’t thank him. 

He doesn’t seem to expect her to.


	7. A Parliament of Owls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 100 of Joseph’s special sermons to Unquiet_Grave, for being my rock when it comes to proofreading, editing and, well, just about anything to do with this story not being a total car crash.

* * *

_He manages to throw her off him again, but he’s much slower to get back up this time. His cheeks are bleeding and one eye is swollen entirely shut and there is more blood bubbling in his mouth. He spits it onto the snow. _

_ Things are broken deep inside him. _

_ She’s not much better, she’s got a piece of shrapnel from one of the planes lodged in her gut, among other things. _

_ She’s thinking that she won’t walk away either. _

_ “Remember...” _

_ He’s wheezing. He breathed fire when their planes blew up. They both did. _

_ “...remember that time at the ranch when we just…” _

_ She actually covers her ears to drown him out, like a child. Hear no evil. _

_ Hear no pain. _

_ He kicks her legs out from underneath her while she’s distracted. _

**Chapter 7: A Parliament of Owls**

The seventh time she stands still with him for a while.

She’s coming to him through deep snow; she’s walked across fields and through the woods from Fall’s End and she’s tired, but she can’t stop. 

Won’t stop. 

After her meeting with Joseph she’d been desperate for companionship and normalcy. Friends and alcohol. She’s spent long evenings in the Spread Eagle, elbows on the bar, sinking into the smoke, the background noise, her glass. Even so, it’s impossible not to notice that there are people...not here. Gone. And the bleakness in Mary May’s eyes, the worry ploughing furrows across Nick’s forehead.

Despite all her efforts they are losing, and people are dying. She built a resistance, now it’s being torn down brick for brick.

Limb from limb.

Eventually the scratchy feeling behind her eyes, the itch in her mind, becomes too distracting and she leaves again.

It only becomes clear to her where she is going when she sees John’s ranch emerge out of darkness and in between trees, illuminated by a waxing gibbous. She stops, clutches at her arm, trying to coax her shallow breaths into becoming deep. A large pale owl flies from the trees above her, out over the open expanse towards his house. Hunting. With its ivory plumage she loses sight of it against all the white, but the moon shines bright enough that she can track its shadow gliding over the snow.

She follows.

It’s foolish of her to go to him at home. Foolish of her to leave blood-covered footprints on the snow, foolish of her to move with all her darkness against white. But at least she’s dark enough to swallow the moon whole. 

She manages to sneak across the grounds and slip into his house unseen by the many guards. She’s getting better at becoming a ghost. 

She looks around once inside. She has never been in here. She helped take his home and then she left her fellow fighters to the ransacking while she headed for the Whitetails. Not long after John had moved surely and ruthlessly to eradicate the Resistance’s presence in his home, all the while she was busy wasting away in a cage. Much blood had been shed, much of it let from good people. 

Now it’s like they were never even here. 

She quietly drops her bag by the window she entered through, then she moves around the shadows of his home. She strokes the furs of animals forever suspended in death, drags her fingers along richly bound leather spines. Takes in the titles: his is an eclectic, wildly uneven collection. She pulls some of them from the shelves. They are all dog-eared and well read. She’s not surprised, but she’s still got a hard time imagining him, all restless energy and lethal _ want _, ever sitting still enough to read.

She’s trying to decide whether she should leave without him ever knowing she was here, or find him where he sleeps, when she sees his Book of Joseph sitting on the large dining table. She goes to pick it up because she wants to see her face through his eyes again, she wants to see more of the inside of _ him_. When crossing the floor she sees the light flashing on the answering machine. She can’t help it. Can’t control the urge to _ know._

She reaches out a hand and presses ‘play’.

Halfway through the message, Joseph’s voice floating all the way up the high ceiling and settling cold around her heart, she senses John behind her. A quiet presence, but the rage at her back is unmistakable and heady. 

She doesn’t turn around. She stands still, and she listens to the message end, and then she listens to the silence. 

Then she fills it.

“I believe him, you know.” She speaks to the large window facing the grounds, she speaks to the moon and its shadows. She imagines sleeping at the bottom of one of its craters, far out there in space. Cradled by vacuum and stars.

“Believe what?”

His voice is much closer to her than she had thought, his voice is almost touching her hair.

“That he loves you. I believe him.”

He spins her around then, fingers hard and furious about her chin, he wrenches her head back, and his breath titillates her jugular. He’s barechested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of pyjama pants low on his hips, and the moonlight makes the swallow soar.

“Just _ what _ do you think you’re doing?” 

She doesn’t try to get out of his hard hold, relishes it instead.

“End of tenancy inspection? Just making sure my guys didn’t leave scuff marks on the parquet and beer cans in the corners?” 

“Funny, Mallory.” 

When she jerks in his grip he releases her and throws his hands out in faux-placation.

“Oh, my _apologies, _I know you gave your name to _ Joseph, _not me, but I assume I can use it now.”

“You’ve known it all along, John. You could have used it whenever you wanted. Don’t play games.”

“But you wouldn’t _ give _ it to me. Only to Joseph. You said you only give it to friends.” 

Oh he’s angry, so very angry, and she drinks it in, swallows it down, can’t get enough. Feeds from his as surely as he feed from hers. It does what friends and whisky couldn’t do: it finally puts her _ right _ after what Joseph did to her. 

“And it would seem we are many things to each other, but ‘friends’ isn’t one of them. You must know I didn’t give my name to Joseph voluntarily.” She stops then, takes a deep breath and a step towards him. Seeks his warmth, if not his comfort. “What did he say? What did he say when he realised I was gone?”

She doesn’t miss how his shoulders hunch, how the lines in his face grow deeper with remembered pain. His voice is bone dry.

“He was _ supremely _ unimpressed. And unsurprised.” He shrugs. “I think I managed to talk him around though. Eventually.” 

“You saved me from him.”

He shakes his head, furrows his brow. 

“I will see you with us if it’s the last thing I do, but that road won’t go via Jacob’s cages, or Faith’s Bliss, or Joseph’s special sermons. It will be me dampening that fire of yours, tempering you. No one else.”

She laughs, and it’s a laugh full of bruises, like it’s being forced out of a throat covered in angry fingerprints.

“When did I become your little vanity project, John? Do you really need big brother’s approval that badly?”

His nostrils flare. There is something strange and dark and manic in his eyes as he nimbly catches the bullet in midair and sends it right back at her.

“You’ve been here in the valley for a while.” 

It’s a statement, not a question. 

“You’ve been sitting in that bar night after night, getting drunk. Surrounded by people, people you call friends. But still lonely. Eventually you come here, to me, instead. Risked quite a lot to get here.” 

He smiles at her, and there’s that cruelty, that instinctive, insidious urge of his to _ excavate _people, flay them. Drape himself in the confessions and sins of others, no matter how innocuous, no matter how painful. Make himself a new skin out of them so he doesn’t have to live in his own.

“Were you _ always _ lonely, Mallory?”

She panics, deflects. 

“Were you always faulty?” 

“No,” he says and she thinks that she believes him.

She takes a step back from him, steps into the moonbeam from the window. 

“Look at you in that light,” he says. “‘_She was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing. __So fine a breath of wind might blow her away’.” _

There’s no softness in his voice as he recites, it’s hard and bitter and angry, as if the finely spun words are offensive and ugly to him.

Then his eyes slide to her arm, to the blood that looks black, and the almost-soft mask settles over his face. The one she sometimes think is at least a little bit real. 

“You’re hurt.”

She snorts. 

“This? Oh, at the rate I’m receiving injuries this one can be considered old news.” 

Blood is dripping from her fingers onto the floor as she speaks. She’s left a dainty trail around his home.

“They..._you _ found me again. Your people. All of you. They find me everywhere. Find _ us_. I’m losing good people. Soon it’ll be good friends.”

He pulls her over to the sofa by the cold fireplace and she hates how small her voice falls out into the big room. Joseph’s had filled this space up to the rafters, and that had been a recording. 

He runs a finger along the angry gash on her arm, just a little bit too hard, and he frowns.

“Even so, my men are under strict orders to bring you to me alive and unharmed if they come across you. This is unacceptable.” He sits on the sofa and pulls her down with him. “Your friends, however, I don’t care a wit for. They made their choice a long while ago.”

She looks him straight in the eyes.

“So did I,” she whispers.

He laughs, and it sounds almost genuine.

“No you didn’t. You haven’t made a choice yet.”

She leans back, puts her head on his shoulder, a hand on his chest. Is reassured that he’s got a heart beating underneath. Blood in his veins. 

“Fuck you, John.”

He moves his lips over her dark hair, tries to untangle the snarl of her curls with his fingers, gives up. Sighs.

“Stay for a couple days,” he says. “I’ve no duties to fulfill all weekend. Sleep in a real bed, eat proper food. Heal. Rest. Be with me. I swear I’ll see you safely away at the end of it.”

He’s so convincing, so earnest, so _ tempting_. And she’s so tired and worn and cold and she knows that she will say yes.

As the word slips over her lips it occurs to her that of the Seed siblings his methods are the most honest. He’s a devil, a manipulator, sadistic and cruel, but he doesn’t _ alter _ minds.

He just bends them to his will. He just…

“Come on, darling.”

She realises with a start that she’s been drifting, floating in that seductive hinterland between waking and sleep. So comfortable on his sofa, on _ him_. It’s almost painful to let him take her by the hand and walk her upstairs, undress her and sit her down in his large bathroom. Ostentatiousness in her peripheral and him crouched in front of her, cleaning her injury. She tips forward into his pupils when they dilate with delight at her hissed pain. He pours more peroxide on the wound to hear it again, then he picks her up and carries her to bed. 

She stretches out on silks and furs, then folds herself in on him, presses her nose into his throat. 

“When did things change?”

He understands what she means even though she could mean so many things. He strokes down the bumps of her spine, splays his hands on her lower back. Pulls her closer into him.

“The time in the forest. After you’d been to the bunker to see Deputy Hudson. You broke my nose, and you were so small and murderous and exquisite in the firelight.” 

He moves his hands up again, strokes along the contours of her face. Seems to want to learn the scripture of it, perhaps so he can remember it always. 

“There were sparks about you. I could almost _ see _ them. Then we touched, and I felt more.”

“Ok,” she whispers, and falls asleep.

* * *

Three days later he catches her on the balcony outside his bedroom, one leg over the railing, dawn painting her pale cheeks pink. 

He sighs, and she can almost run her fingertips along his disappointment, his frustration. But most of all his anger. She sees him try to swallow it down to reason with her, but he was never very good at that. His knuckles are white.

“Or you could stay.” He takes a step towards her but doesn’t stretch his hand out, as if he’s afraid of startling her. 

“How can I? _ How?_”

He shakes his head, looks down at his feet. Looks up again, but past her. Beyond her. To the spot where the sun will rise.

“Do you know? Sometimes I wish things were different.”

“But they are not,” she says. 

”Tell me about it.”

An owl glides out from the trees, and she thinks it might be the same one that flew ahead of her the night she arrived. Same pale plumage, same ponderous but certain flight. She sees him tracking it with his eyes, looking after it long after it’s out of sight. 

“Do you like birds?”

“I like flying,” he says simply.

She can understand that. 

“I dream of flying,” she says. “All the time.”

“Maybe…” he starts, then stops himself, starts again somewhere else. Looks at her, and nods. “I’ll see you.”

And she, she lets herself drop down to the snow and disappear away again.

Even though it hurts.


	8. A Storytelling of Ravens

_She looks at him where he lies on the ground before her. He’s twisted, nearly defeated, but defiance sharp and vicious in his eyes. _

_His hair is wild, his eyes heavy, and suddenly, stupidly, she gets a flashback of waking next to him in his bed, his mussed hair and sleepy eyes and how almost-content and almost-happy she had felt. _

_That gut punch is harder than any of the ones he’s just doled out. _

_She advances. Kicks him in the side when he laughs at her. _

_Oh, she just wants him to die now so she can stop hurting him. _

**Chapter 8: A Storytelling of Ravens**

The eighth time she sees him, he saves her life.

She comes running back from the Henbane just as askew and jumbled as last time. Her synapses firing every which way, the outlines of everything soft and untrustworthy. Fireflies fucking everywhere. Warped sadness over lost people and the exhaustion writ in every line of Whitehorse’s face. They’ve been pushed out of the region entirely now, all plans inexplicably scuppered, obstacles and counter attacks and torn bodies at every turn. The Whitetails aren’t much better, and she needs some rest now. Needs to pull her mind back together. Needs silence, not screams. 

She discovers an abandoned little cottage in north Holland Valley and she stays, finds it hard to move on, even though she knows how dangerous it is to stand still. She’s drawn to the contrast of the homely rose patterned bedspread with the hard liquor bottles spread about the place, the faded floral wallpaper with the rough wood finishings, the dark sorrows in the corners with the winter sun coming through the windows. The fact that it feels like the owner left just five minutes ago, is perhaps just out back chopping firewood for the wood burner, should be unsettling. But it isn’t. The view of the snowy mountains is unending and quiet from the small porch and she loves it here, loves the frost on the window panes and the booze.

She sometimes wonders what happened to the man that lived here. She finds photos of an old life, sweet in its simplicity; a young daughter and a wife, home, hunting, fishing. Then notes to suggest he'd become a member of Eden’s Gate. Just him.

Then nothing.

It’s late and she’s getting ready for bed after a busy day when she hears a car approaching on the icy track leading up to the cottage. Headlights swoop through the windows, distorted by trees and falling snow, throwing a sinister shadow puppet show on the walls. 

It’s too late and too obvious to kill the one bedroom light now. She’s only in an oversized shirt, but she grabs her gun from the bedside table and stands poised to the side of the front door, ready to pounce on the intruder, ready to kill.

The door slams open, and only at the very last moment does she stop herself from firing.

It’s John, snowflakes in his dark hair and white hot rage in his eyes. She’s not seen him since the time at his ranch, weeks ago, but now he’s found her again. He walks straight in and throws his keys on the side table, for all as if he’s returning home after a long day at work. 

While passing, without looking at her and ignoring her gun, he grabs her arm with a gloved hand and pulls her with him into the bedroom. Pushes her down onto the the rosy bedspread while he unbuckles his belt, pulls down his zipper. He’s still wearing his coat, his boots.

“Rough day at the office, dear?” She tries to sit back up, but he’s on her before she gets the chance.

“Thanks to you I’ve had an _atrocious _day, and now I fully intend to fuck you into the mattress and maybe, just _maybe_, feel a bit better.” His voice is a growl, full of sharp, jagged things, as he flips her onto her stomach. 

“Nice little stunt, by the way.” His hands are rougher than necessary as he pulls down her underwear, even though she lifts her hips to help him. “And I assure you that I meant what I said. When all this is over, when we can walk on the face of the earth once again, you will rebuild that sign with your bare hands.” He pushes her shirt up to get enough access to her breasts that he can pinch her nipples hard, make her gasp and buck against him. “But don’t worry. I’ll help you.”

“Well, I _hate _that fucking word,” she murmurs as he drags his lips down her buttocks, grabs her hips with leather-clad hands and raises her enough from the mattress that he can lick into her from behind. She groans, and she’s never heard herself sound so needy, so raw. So broken for him. She pushes herself up into his face in an obscene way. Presents for him like an animal in heat, prostate and submissive, begging to take him, take all of him.

She should be revolted with herself, but she can’t be bothered.

“And yet you’ve given it to me enough times, screamed it straight into my mouth,” he mocks between long strokes with his tongue, between savage little nips. 

“Oh get fucked, John Seed.”

“I fully intend to,” he snarls as he moves up her body again and forces a gloved thumb into her mouth, presses down on her tongue. She drools around the soft leather. “But I’ve had quite enough of your lip. You’re to shut up and stay still.” Then without any warning he bucks inside her so hard she slides along the bed. Splits her wide open, makes her arch her spine and cry out.

“Oh my god!”

It’s muffled because of the obstruction in her mouth but he hears her just fine.

“Indeed,” he growls as he grabs her neck with his teeth to keep her still for him, her hip with his free hand and puts all his weight on her as he fucks into her so deep he bumps against something far inside with each thrust. Her heart, maybe. She thinks that her body will leave an indent in the mattress forever. 

She pushes back towards him as best as she can, and the bedspread turns into a kaleidoscope of unbearable lust and sharp thorns as she slips and slides and freefalls towards her end, her little death.

Familiar enough with each other’s bodies by now, he’s able to read the signs.

“Oh, no no no. This one is just for me,” he breathes into her hair. “It seems eminently unfair that you get to come too.”

“Try to stop me,” she murmurs around his thumb.

He doesn’t, and she comes harder than she ever has. After a few more hard thrusts he comes too, and he stifles his roar by biting deep into her shoulder. She can feel blood trickle, and him lick it away.

Then he stands from the bed, still furious, still overflowing with kinetic energy. He chucks off boots, coat, shirt, leaves his jeans hanging open and loose about his hips. Ready to take her again in a while. He jerks his chin towards her.

“That’s _my _shirt.” 

“I stole it.”

“Of course you did.” He shakes his head, paces barefoot across the rug, grabs one of the dusty bottles from the dresser and drinks, deep swallows of cheap bourbon. She finds herself falling into the way his throat moves, the sinews of his tattooed arm as he holds the bottle to his mouth.

He catches her looking, and leans down over her, finds her mouth with his. Slips her a mouthful of the burning liquid, and she swallows it as eagerly as she swallows him.

He stands straight again, looks down on her where she’s splayed on the sheets, too worn out to move, licking bourbon off her lips.

“One of my favourite versions of you. Dripping with me. Pliant and quiet. Would that I could keep you like this always. Keep you out of mischief.”

“Mischief? Bit of a mild word for what’s going on out there, don’t you think?”

“Not at all,” he says. “In the grand scheme of things, once the end of the world arrives, that’s all the impact that you and your little Resistance will have had on us: slight mischief. A trifle. I wish you would see that before it’s too late for you.”

She shakes her head. Changes the subject. 

“How did you know I was here?”

“_Please,”_ he scoffs, and she lets it go even though that scratching behind her eyes is getting louder. Talons on bones.

He sighs and gets back into bed with her and the bottle. And she, she tries to ignore how she enjoys tangling her legs with his, the weight of his arms around her, how she rests her head on his shoulder.

“You just leave,” he says on an exhale. “No word from you. Not a single one. And then you reappear and blow up my things.”

“I’m not sorry,” she says.

“I know you’re not.” He digs his fingers into her arm. “And you _will _rebuild it.”

She takes the bottle from him, drinks three deep swallows, shudders, welcomes the warmth.

“I tried to kill Faith,” she says conversationally. 

“Oh?” His voice is verging on indifferent.

“Yes. She put a garland of Bliss in my hair and kissed my cheek. So I tried to strangle her, I thought she was just another fucking hallucination but she was _real _and she just...stood there and let me. And I couldn’t do it.”

He hums noncommittally and not for the first time she thinks that he’s not overly fond of his little lost soul-eater of a sister. He changes the subject.

“Do you like it here? This place?”

She thinks that he’s asking about more than the cottage, and she suspects that he knows that she’s kept to Holland Valley for a good while now. She will never admit it to him, but she feels most at home here, with the sound and smell of the Ponderosas, the proximity to _him_. 

“Who used to live here?”

“An old man. A trapper and a hunter. He’s gone now.”

“A lot of people are gone, aren’t they?”

He kisses her temple.

“Yes. And more still will go.”

“Sure. But your people aren’t dying. Mine are. They are dying all around me and we are _losing _and here I am fucking you like there’s no tomorrow.”

He brushes her hair out of her face, leans forward and kisses her, slowly, languidly, his tongue wrapping about hers. Then he pulls back, and his smile is lazy and lethal.

“Well darling, there _isn’t_.”

“Not that again. Spare me the end of days, John.”

He sighs.

“When are you going to give in and realise just where you belong?”

She hears a familiar noise from out the porch then, and can feel a smile grow wide on her face. He does a double take at that, stares at her, and doesn’t stop her when she jumps out of bed.

“My raven!” 

“Your...raven.”

His voice is bone dry as he steps out of the bed behind her and follows her out into the hallway. She grabs some jerky from the side table and opens the door, lets the winter come gliding inside.

“It comes by every day. I’ve been feeding it.”

He hangs back in the doorway, weary of the cold, while she turns on the porch light and steps out, half naked and barefoot in the snow. Drawn to the large black carrion bird perched on the porch railing.

“My favourite bird, ravens,” she says and softly clicks her tongue at it. It hops closer, unendingly curious but wary still, bright black eyes watching her every movement. “They are incredibly clever. Hello, you,” she sing-songs to the bird. “I call him Muninn.”

“‘Mind’,” he snorts quietly behind her, and she’s not really surprised that he knows of myths and fairytales and things that were true a long long time ago. She had seen the Edda, alongside Beawolf and the Gilgamesh, in his bookshelf. 

“Oh don’t be such a…”

Her admonishment dies in her mouth when a man steps out from between the trees, sudden, unexpected, coming from the direction of the old school. A cultist, heavily armed. Perhaps he had seen the lights, the car, heard their voices and come to investigate. His eyes meet hers and she sees recognition and alarm and his gun seeking her heart. A shot rings out, the raven sets flight and she closes her eyes at the feel of its wing brushing her cheek.

Marvels that after everything _this _is the way she’ll finally go. 

But there’s no excruciating pain, no lethal, malevolent force jerking her body backwards. She opens her eyes again. The man is the one to fall down and she, she’s the one to remain standing. She looks at the blood spreading across the snow, illuminated by the porch light. It’s pretty, she thinks.

“He would have killed you,” John says flatly from behind her.

“I didn’t know you were armed,” she says just as tonelessly. She doesn’t turn around, and he laughs quietly, bitterly, steps forward and puts his arms around her from behind. The gun hangs loosely from his hand. Still smoking, and there is gunpowder in her hair.

“I’m always armed around you, darling.” 

The world around her slows, is silent and still. She leans her head back against his shoulder, looks up, loses herself in their galaxy stretching like a road of winter across the skies. Nothing is right, everything is askew, but the stars and nebulas remain in their given places. 

The raven leads her mind back down to Earth. It caws where it’s now perched on the dead man’s shoulder, meets her eyes across the snow.

White, black, red; such beautiful hues, such striking contrasts.

“‘..._ and Muninn to the slain’,” _John says, and the words mingle with the gunpowder and the snowflakes in her hair.


	9. An Abattoir of Shrikes

“_You don’t have to do this, you know.”_

_ At the look on her face he hisses out a chuckle, and bloodied spittle stains his lips. _

_ “Oh, the sadness in your smile.” He struggles into a half sitting position, his coat spread about him. “The madness in your smile.” _

_ He regains his original train of thought with a pained shake of his head, retraces his mental staggerings and stumbles with great effort. Brain injury, she thinks. _

_ “You don’t have to do this. I know you think you do. I know you _ ** _will_ ** _ . But you don’t have to.” _

_ She hesitates, but then she doesn’t, and she pushes him back down again by his shoulders. How can she listen to him now, after all this? After everything he’s done? _

_ The tattoo he gave her, not yet an hour old, it burns on her chest. _

_ His betrayal burns hotter still. _

**Chapter 9: An Abbatoir of Shrikes **

The ninth time he force grows flowers in her heart, even though it’s winter.

Things are almost over for the Resistance. Despite everything she’s done they are falling apart, shattering by her feet, and she is walking on shards. 

Almost all of them have fallen back to Fall’s End, one of the last remaining Resistance bastions, and it’s with ugly fury she suspects that is only because John is going _ easy _ on her, treating her with his fucked up version of kid gloves while he’s waiting for her to see his way. He’s _ allowing _ them to hole up in his little fiefdom, she thinks, ragtag and beat as they are, but not quite broken. 

It is desperation, guilt and a few fingers of bourbon that makes her set out for his bunker. Their setbacks have been so great, she needs just one success. Something that makes a difference. Something to cling to.

Something to make herself feel better. 

She slips away without telling anyone, that bone-deep need for loneliness and open skies a particularly unbearable itch under her skin this early evening. It’s not an easy trek, even as close as the bunker is to Fall’s End. The snow is deep and she uses back routes and animal paths. And she takes her time. Breathes in the cold, the old secrets of the stars above her, the silence of the falling snow. Fancies that she walks a parallel universe, a winter world somewhere unreachable and far away.

Then she comes across tiny corpses on thorns, impaled there, she knows, by rapacious songbirds. Cute and grey-winged and hungry for itty-bitty hearts, tender intestines. Frozen blood and dead eyes and fur painted by frost, and again she remembers how she walks a slaughterhouse, how beauty and death slow dance so _ close _ together in this place.

Hope County. 

Eden’s Gate. 

The cult has bled into the bedrock, into the soil and roots and homes. They’ve made it theirs, but now, somehow, it’s _ hers _ too.

She arrives finally, exhausted and cold, but the blueprint of this subterranean world is merged with her amygdala, she doesn’t really need her wits about her to find her way. She’s well versed with its tunnels and pathways, the darkness and fresh spectres. Becomes one of them as she heads downwards, moves unseen in the nooks and crannies and dark corners. She’s been here before, hasn’t she, and she’s dreamed about it plenty since. It is a tomb for her conscience, after all, this gallery proudly displaying his crimes like bronze statues and paintings in egg tempera. 

The crimes she ignore every time she gets close to him. The atrocities she turn her back on with his tongue in her mouth.

She knows where to find Hudson too; how could she forget the place deep down in this hole where he stood with a reinforced door between them and baptised her _ Wrath_? _ God, _she had wanted to tear in under his _ Sloth _ tattoo and dig out his heart and eat it right in front of him. 

Now she thinks he might be gnawing on hers instead. He got there first: joke’s on her.

But when she clasps hands with Joey, unchains her and helps her to stand from her cot, then she feels like a little bit of her old self comes trickling back. Fills up some up the cracks he’s made in her. And when they run side by side down the winding hallways, then she can taste faint hope for her own goodness like a spring breeze on her tongue.

But she’s really not _ surprised _ when bearded cultists appear, in front of them and behind. Corrals them with guns and knives and leers.

Quite planned, she thinks, a nicely executed trap. Had he seen her on the cameras? Had he had someone follow her from Fall’s End? Or had he simply just _ known_, perhaps before she herself did?

Calmly she shoots enough men in the line in front of them that Hudson may slip through. She knows that they won’t shoot back, even if she is pistol whipped and almost forced to her knees. But oh, at least Hudson runs like that wind on her tongue, as weakened as she is. 

Of course, it doesn’t last. Too soon Joey realises that she’s running alone.

“I'm not leaving you,” she screams from where she’s stopped on top of the stairs, so selfless and so fucking dumbly _ brave_, despite all she’s endured. 

How is Hudson to know that any sacrifice of hers would be for nothing, that John wouldn’t hurt his Deputy?

Much.

And here he comes now, as if summoned by a whiff of her dying hope. Steps out from behind his men and casually points his gun right at her heart. His eyes doesn’t leave hers as he jerks his chin in Hudson’s direction. 

“Let that one run if she chooses. If I haven’t been able to convince her after all this time then she really isn’t worth saving.”

He steps through the line of armed men, comes to a stop in front of her. The look he gives her is inscrutable, blank, but she sees that reassuring, warm pinprick of madness far back.

“This one, however, I think I want to give a second go. I think she can still be saved.” He throws his arms wide, raises his voice, makes it boom with belief and prayer. “I think she can be made to see that hers is doomed path.”

Ever the showman, performing to his audience: his acolytes, and most importantly Hudson, giving her that tantalising, crucial glimpse of capture and threat so that she finally pulls her senses about herself and runs. 

She breathes an honest sigh of relief. Hudson, at the very least, is safe. She’s accomplished that much. 

When two of his men step forward to grab her arms he waves them away. 

“Oh don’t worry, I think I can handle this little one myself,” he winks at them. He relieves her of all her weapons with easy familiarity around her body and clothing, lets them clatter to the floor, before grabbing her by the scruff of her neck and marching her onward.

“Back to the confessional we go, Deputy!”

He lets her free once they’re in the red room. Red light, red blood, red behind her eyes. Those fucking antlers.

He leans back with his elbows on the work table, looks amused at the twitching nerve at the corner of her eye. Probably correctly surmising it’s caused by flashbacks and trauma. Watches her as she circles the room, dodges dried up puddles of blood and tugs at her own hair. 

“You came alone. No back-up. Cocky, aren’t we? Sure I’d let you run amok about the place, not quite so confident I wouldn’t string your friends up by their guts if I caught them?”

She shrugs and he starts idly playing with the tools on the work table. 

“Which I would’ve done, by the way, so I guess it was wise of you to leave them at home.”

His smile is cruel, venom dripping from his teeth, his eyes heavy with an odd gravity. Or a _ lack _ of gravity. It’s like he’s sucking otherworldly, dark matter from this room, like being here, in this space, lends him godlike powers. The power to dig, unearth, expose.

_ See._

“So. Why this sudden urge to rescue Deputy Hudson?” He throws his hands out. “I honestly thought you had forgotten about her. Nary an enquiring word for _ months_.”

“That’s not true.”

She knows it’s true, and he knows that she knows. All he gives her is a raised brow.

“You’re playing games with yourself, Mallory. At least grant me the grace of not playing them with _ me._”

He suddenly becomes serious, something bleak and foreign about him.

“You’ve doomed her now, you know. She was safe here. Now, because of your need to prove to yourself that you’re a decent human being, your need to assail your _ guilt, _she’ll perish with the rest of them.”

He chuckles, shakes his head.

“You don’t need to sacrifice lives and go to these theatrics, Mal. If you want to see me all you need to do is let me _ know_.”

She lifts her chin, indicates their surroundings, his revolting little playroom trying to masquerade as something that could be a sacrament.

“I _ did._”

He shakes his head again, tired, resigned, for all as if she’s an unruly little girl and he the poor sap in charge of correcting her behaviour. 

“Well, since we’re _ here, _ and since it would look suspicious if you were to immediately escape...fancy unburdening your heavy heart?” 

He continues even as she shakes her head _ no_.

“When were you happy last?”

She hates him for making her a liar to everyone but him. She hates him for splitting her open, even if it’s only a little. Hates him for pulling truth from her lips like red string.

Hates herself for giving it to him.

“At your ranch. When we just..._ were_. Existed outside of everything.”

“And before that?”

“I can’t remember.”

“I think that might be a lie.”

He’s asked her this before, whispered his soft but sharp questions into her ear back at the ranch, while she was burrowed deep into the world of crisp clean bedsheets and maybe-safety and the warmth of him. He had tried to lure secrets out of her, had asked about her past, and she had groggily evaded him even as he moved deeper inside her.

But she gives him a tidbit now, a small mouthful, enough to tide him over to the main meal he may never get to eat.

“My grandparents’ farm. Far from here. There were so many flowers in their garden. There were swallows flying back and forth. It seemed to be summer always. I was five. Maybe six.”

“Your parents?”

“_No_,” she says, and she laces that word with all her wrath, and she can tell from the rapture on his face that it’s delectable to him.

Indeed he pulls her close now, kisses her to pull it from her mouth onto his tongue, runs his hands through her hair. 

“You know, I’ve been fantasising about fucking you down here.”

She nuzzles into the hollow of his neck, inhales everything that is wrong with him, draws him into her lungs like cigarette smoke.

He’s her twenty a day, and a knife on top.

“You’re sick.” 

He takes in her blown pupils, the flush creeping high on her cheeks, the tip of her tongue flicking out to wet her lips.

“I’m in good company, darling.”

“I fucking hate you.”

His grin is full of teeth.

“Charmed, I’m sure. Now if you could just bend over and grab ahold of the table for me, there’s a good girl.”

She does, high on her toes, hips up and shoulders down, hair dragging over the rough and bloodied wood, over his tools. He stands behind her, so close she can feel how hot and hard he is even through their clothes.

Despite the lewd, carnal position he goes slow. He’s gentle. Seem to understand that right now she craves the exact opposite, but is determined not to give it to her. He undresses her carefully. He strokes her skin as he goes, tickles his fingers down her sides, so at odds with their malevolent, haunted surroundings and the things he would normally do in here. He breathes kisses across the entire expanse of her, as worshipful as if she is his broken goddess. Moth wings over her cheekbones. Spiderwebs between her ribs.

He makes her _ feel, _ and she can’t stand it _ . _

But when he finally slides inside her, uses his hips to drive her up onto the table until her toes comes clear off the floor, then she knows it’s too late anyway. He’s insinuated himself inside her; he lives somewhere around her rib cage now. Like poisonous flowers growing and prospering in her chest cavity; beautiful, all shades of black. They grow down into her lungs and up her throat. Tendrils sliding and moving everywhere. 

There’s the pressure of collapsing and imploding stars behind her eyes, impossible colours and songs. And she’s glad she’s facing away from him, because those are tears running down her cheeks, warm and hateful. They drop down onto the work bench each time he plunges into her and mix with the old blood there, making it wet and alive again.

She resists the urge to fingerpaint with it. What glorious watercolours she could create with all the blood he’s spilt. With all the blood _ she’s _ spilt. Sunsets perhaps. Or red cottages in red woods. Autumn trees.

Oh yes, she’s sick too.

Afterwards he buttons up his shirt, strokes his hair back into place. Then he hands her her bag, stuffs her underwear into the breast pocket of her coat. Gives her a wry look.

“I trust you can find your own way out?”

“I could. But I want you to walk with me.”

He actually throws his head back and laughs, heartily, then gives her his arm. A proper gentleman. A jaunty Sunday stroll.

Linked together they traverse the labyrinthine backroads of his bunker, his tatted midnight domain. He brings her to the surface through a hidden exit, they emerge topside far out in the forest. 

She looks up, gently rests her sanity against the gas clouds within the winter Milky Way, stretching into the night sky anchored by Sirius.

She nods up at it as he puts his arms around her, rests his chin on her crown.

“When I die I want to go live up there. _ In _ there.”

He nuzzles at her temple, seem to enjoy rubbing his face against all her jumbled thoughts. His voice is gravelly and, she thinks, almost true.

“I’ve tried to live up in the sky, Mal. I’ve really tried. But for all my flying I can’t will it to be real. I don’t belong up there. And nor do you. We both belong down here. On the ground. Below it.”

”Do you genuinely believe we should both live in a grave?”

He doesn’t answer, and she gently disentangles herself from him and walks away into the night without saying goodbye.

* * *

Later she clink beer bottles with Joey in the Spread Eagle. There are fairy lights and Christmas music and frost on the window panes.

She wonders why she can’t feel a single thing away from him.


	10. A Pitying of Doves

_ You're such a killer _

_ So shoot me down again _

_ It won't hurt when the killing's done by a friend _

Joakim Berg, ‘747’ 

* * *

  
  
_ “I actually thought…” she hates how broken her voice is, how full of ugly despair. “I thought it was real.” _

_ She lets herself fall down on top of him, legs on either side of his waist, and grabs hold of the thong holding the key with both hands. Pulls it taut, as he coughs out something that she refuses to hear. _

_ (“it was”) _

_ His eyes shine with glee and maybe tears, and the Devil and the deep blue sea are the same, they’re the _ ** _same_**_, how had she not seen that before? _

** _“_** _Do it,” he whispers. “Do it, or I’ll win.” _

_ “You’ll win anyway,” she says, and twists the thong hard around his neck, cuts off all his air. He twitches and arches and rocks. _

_ Together they make some horrifying angels on the snow. _

**Chapter 10: A Pitying Of Doves**

The tenth time he breaks her heart clean in two.

He finds her sitting in the middle of the icy road out of Fall’s End, cradling Earl Whitehorse’s lifeless body in her lap. 

She sees his boots come into view, and casts a quick glance up. He stands wide legged and sure before her, his long coat throwing dancing shadows, backlit as he is by the setting sun. 

She looks down at Whitehorse’s face again. He doesn’t look peaceful in death because he didn’t go peacefully. He went with a scream. She tries to stroke some of the blood out of his hair. So much red on white hurts her eyes.

“Grace too,” she conversationally tells John’s legs, jerks her chin over her shoulder to indicate the woods behind her. “Sharky’s over there. And Jess. Everyone’s dying, it seems.”

He crouches before her, lifts her chin. Tries to get her to look at him. But her eyes glide around, unseeing, unable to find purchase anywhere. She’s trying to get things to fit right in her head, trying to understand all the broken pieces, trying to get them to slide into a pattern. 

He leans forwards and presses a kiss to her forehead. She shivers, and she wants to move into him, because he is always so warm and she so cold.

But she holds herself back.

“I’ve retaken Fall’s End. You already lost the Henbane. Never really had the Whitetails. It’s _ over_.” He grasps her shoulder, shakes her gently. “Time to come home, Mal. Come to us, come to _ me_, and be safe. Walk into a new world. Unto Eden.” 

She ignores his demand masquerading as an entreaty. She’s heard it before. But there’s something else, something slowly slithering forward through her subconscious.

That scratching behind her eyes grows stronger. Deep gouges in bone. A terrible pattern, eerie, hieroglyphs she’s straining to understand.

“How do you always _ find _ me?” she whispers. “You _ always _ find me, no matter when, no matter where. At first I thought scouts and spies. Then...then I thought...well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. But there’s an explanation, isn’t there, John? A real one.”

She finally meets his gaze, straight on. The blue in his eyes eats away at her soul, tears out entire chunks at a time. His smile is nearly all teeth.

“The truth, John. Please. The _ truth_.”

He looks at her for a long moment, then slowly he pulls his knife out of his jeans. She looks at the light glinting off the blade, red from the setting sun. He reaches for the journey pack next to her, and her brow furrows and nausea hits her. The dread; the sudden, foolish wish for ignorance. 

She had asked. Now he’s answering. She wishes she hadn’t. She wishes he wouldn’t.

“I studied you carefully before that time we met in the forest. Took note of things. And you were never without this bag. Your entire life stuffed into this pack, it seems. Just reinforced the impression I gained of you as a rootless, flitting nomad. No home anywhere. Nowhere to return to. That can be a strength, of course. But also a weakness.” 

He chuckles bleakly, draws the knife along the bottom seam, slowly, delicately. Slits it open, then reaches in. Comes out with a small black box, small enough to have gone unnoticed by her, sewn into the lining of her bulky, overloaded bag.

“This would normally sit on a wolf collar. Jacob use them, to get his Judges. I borrowed one.” 

His voice is soft as he takes her hand and gently places the tracker in her palm. She holds is as gingerly as if it’s the most precious, gleaming jewel. But it isn’t. It’s death and betrayal burning her skin, and she wraps her fingers about it, so hard as to make them bleed, as if she could crumple the metal in her fist. 

“You catch one wolf,” he continues, “and tag it, and then you let it go. The wolf leads you to the rest of the pack, and now instead of having one wolf you have all.”

“And me the Judas animal,” she whispers. “Where are my thirty pieces of silver, John?”

He sighs, rubs his thumb across her cold lower lip.

“It started out as a tactic, a _ plot_, sure, but now…”

“I should’ve known,” she interrupts. “Mary May told me how you caught her, back along.” Her voice is flat as she thinks of it all. All the losses. All the death. The defeats.

All wrought by him and her. Death and his mistress.

He’d given her back her bag, that first time out in the woods. A peace offering. He’d ensured she’d kept it with her since. 

Oh, wasn’t he _ clever _ and wasn’t she a _ fool_. 

“You know now, and you can choose to throw the tracker away. But then I won’t know where you are anymore. I won’t be able to help or intervene if you are in danger.”

“And you won’t be able to track me, pass my whereabouts to your siblings, follow me to innocent people and kill them.”

She doesn’t recognise her own voice, it’s so fractured and thin. 

“The ones left, at least,” she adds.

He sighs, and looks at her with something that might have been pity, if John Seed have ever been truly capable of pity. She thinks of the young boy in the Polaroid. Had he known human emotions then, or had they already been ripped out of him? 

Was he born wrong? 

He gently tucks some hair behind her ear, slides a finger down her jaw. 

“They’ll be dead soon anyway. The end is imminent. It’s _ coming_.”

She isn’t even sure why she is feeling betrayed, why she feels like he’s just ripped her heart out of her chest and is sucking on the vena cava like a juice box.

He’s her _ enemy_, and he’s been careful never to make any promises.

In his own way he’s been more honest than her. 

“And the fucking? Was that planned too? Did you have to force yourself to do it?”

He makes her meet his eyes then, his grip on her chin so hard that she whines as he wrenches her face up towards him.

“That was unplanned. I didn't mean for it to happen. But it did, and I don’t regret it. I _ can’t._” He looks sincere, but she had thought she knew what his sincerity felt like and she had been wrong.

His grip on her is still brutal, so at odds with the soft tentativeness of his words. 

“What I feel for you, Mal, it’s...unquantifiable. But not false. Never false.”

She doesn’t care. Here, finally, comes the anger, the wrath, and she grabs at it because it’s familiar. Safe. Envelopes herself in it, wraps it about her body like a shimmering cloak, stitches of fire, lining of screams. 

He looks at her, tilts his head.

“Oh, there’s that animal in your eyes,” he says softly, almost with wonder. “I love that about you.”

Her fists clenches and her own heartbeats echo in her head but her voice is calm, almost a whisper.

“Leave. The next time I see you I will kill you. I _ swear_!”

The last word rushes out into the air to become a shout, and it sends a flock of birds, grey and sleek, ascending heavenwards from the trees. Mourning doves, and as they pass in front of the sun they turn briefly red.

His eyes flash, mirth and violence and something softer in between the two, but she refuses to acknowledge that.

She can’t.

“Is this your last word on the matter, Mallory?”

“You can be sure it is.”

He sighs and stands back up, and she follows quickly, jerkily. Won’t allow him to tower over her. She makes sure to never once let go of his eyes as she stomps down on the tracker, grinds it into the road under her boot.

And so they stand opposite each other, so close, but separated by a distance vaster than Hell, and he smiles. It’s bleak death, that smile.

“Very well. You’ve made your decision. Let’s give you something to be _ really _ angry about then.”

He turns and leaves, and she feels like she just threw a few - less than a handful, really - faintly gleaming stars into knee-deep mud.

* * *

His broadcast comes through the next day, his words cutting into her as knives as surely as he’d planned. 

_ ”I’ve gathered your… _ ** _remaining_ ** _ friends here in Fall’s End to atone for your sins. You’re welcome to join us. After all, if it weren’t for _ ** _you_ ** _ they wouldn’t be in this predicament. _

_ This is your last chance to say Yes.”_

* * *

She stops outside the church, takes in the dead ravens he’s had nailed all along the entrance. She wonders if the friendly, curious one from the cottage is among them.

She wouldn't put it past him.

Then she squares her shoulders, and she steps inside.

This will be the end of him. She’ll make sure of it.

* * *

She _ fails_.

She _ almost _ kills him.

Almost.

She is strangling him with the leather thong holding his key. She comes close, so incredibly close. The tendons on his neck are bulging and his eyes are bulging too but he won’t stop fucking _ smiling._

She stops.

Perhaps it’s the way he laughs, even through the pain; or perhaps because it’s the pain _ making _ him laugh. 

Perhaps it’s how he’s so broken she couldn’t ever hold all the pieces of him, even if she cupped her hands together and made a bowl.

Perhaps it’s just the red on his lips and the blue in his eyes.

She doesn’t know.

But she lowers him back down by the thong even as he coughs up more blood, and she is almost gentle. 

“I can’t do this anymore,” and she hardly realises it’s her voice falling through her lips. 

She’s worn to the bones.

She pitches forward next to him, one arm falling limply across his chest. With the other she grabs hold of the large piece of plane shrapnel in her stomach, and with a strangled cry she pulls it out. There, that should speed things up. Their breaths align and slow together, and her eyes blink towards the mountainside, takes in the sharp edges and loose snow blowing in the wind and the smoke columns from their planes. 

She thinks it appropriate that they would die together. 

“I love you, you fuck,” she breathes. “Not that you deserve it.”

His voice in her ear, his laughter wet with blood, his beard scratching her cheek.

“You little_ fool.”_

Then everything is gone, one second to the next.


	11. After

  
  
**After: When Bombs Fall Like Autumn Leaves**

_ “I pulled you down with me when I fell _

_ And then, I just slid to the side” _

Joakim Berg, ‘Ensammast i Sverige’

* * *

She is aware even before she fully wakes that she’s a prisoner. The red light through her clenched eyelids is known to her, she’s bathed in it before, and she can feel the shackles about her wrists. The smell too...funny how old pain and fear can linger on air. She thinks of roses and lavender in a long ago garden

(_grandmother, __do you live still_?) 

she thinks of them after rain, and it’s peculiar how olfactory memories work, how clear and clean they are, how _ real. _But it’s darkness she draws through her nose now, no floral basenotes, no top notes at all. 

She opens her eyes, because there is no other choice.

The room she’s in is small, utilitarian, but some effort has been made at comfort. Homeliness even, even though she is so clearly buried in the ground. 

There’s a dresser with a mirror above it, her few possessions neatly stacked on top. There’s a vase with dried flowers on the little table next to her bed. There’s a royal blue throw on an overstuffed armchair, so woefully out of place. And...

Tacked to the rough concrete wall next to the mirror she sees the portrait he’d drawn of her, the tattoo sketch. She’d last seen it fly away on the wind as she’d tried to kill him, but he must have found it somehow.

Or just drawn it again.

It never occurs to her to doubt that he is alive. If she is here then so is he.

She tries to sit up, but can’t. It’s not because of the chains, no, they are long enough that she may move fairly comfortably on the bed but not, crucially, strangle herself. Or anyone else, for that matter.

It’s simply because she is too weak, and because her body is broken in so many interesting ways, and because the pain is so intense it becomes something _ abstract_.

She falls away into unconsciousness again.

* * *

The next time he’s there, sitting in the armchair. He smiles at her when she opens her eyes. 

“You’ve been asleep for the longest time. Days.”

His voice is hoarse, raspy with pain. He sits forward with effort, braces his elbows on his knees. He’s in jeans and T-shirt, and he looks more dead than alive.

He seems to read her mind, too. He was always good at that.

“I wasn’t sure you’d live. I wasn’t sure _ I’d _ live.”

His eyes are sunken and his skin an atlas of bruises and wounds. One hand shakes uncontrollably, wild jerks, seemingly separate from him, removed from his control.

She did that, and she’s not sorry.

“I apologise for the chains. They will go once I’m certain you won’t hurt yourself.” He leans even further forward, and she can see how much it hurts. “Or others,” he adds as an afterthought. 

He stands, walks across the room, and absently she admires his resilience. He shouldn’t be up and about at all. Then again, he’s always thrived on pain. Performed dark magic with it. Spun it about his fingers like the finest silk threads, red with blood.

He sits down again on the edge of her bed, and she doesn’t try to kill him. She already knows she can’t bring it to completion. 

“I want you to see something.”

With his good hand he loosens her chains, using a new key on a new thong, then helps her upright with an arm around her shoulder. She’s furious that she can’t hold back her gasps of pain, that she has to lean heavily against him just to shuffle forward. 

He feels so familiar and so warm and she can’t stand it.

He takes her over to the mirror, stands behind her and grasps her chin to make her look. She studies their reflections. With their dark hair and light eyes they look so _ alike_. And now…

Dark stains, splotches, are decorating both their faces. His left side, her right, and they are mirroring each other like a human Rorschach test. 

Permanent burn marks from fuel when his plane exploded in their faces. 

“We match,” he whispers into the back of her head, his hand splayed at the base of her throat. 

She looks and looks, and she could laugh, but it would hurt too much.

She’s clad only in her sports bra and some too-large sweats, and bruises and cuts and a large bandage across her abdomen. It’s her dragging her fingers along _ ‘wrath’, _not him. 

“Have you come to cut it out?” she asks, voice hoarse and unused, her throat dry and pained.

“No need,” he says. “Didn’t you know? The world ended last night.”

* * *

She refuses to believe him. She’s convinced it’s one of his sick games. 

So when she’s strong enough to walk he takes her up to the hatch, his flock moving aside for them like a parting, furious sea. He stands close behind her as she looks out the little square window. It might as well be a viewport from a spaceship floating aimlessly among stars, that’s how little she can place what she sees outside as something belonging on the Earth she tried to love.

Better to think they are on a dead moon somewhere beyond the rings of Saturn. 

She stands like that for a very long time, maybe hours, but he doesn’t seem to tire or grow impatient. He watches her face as she watches the cinders, then he takes her back to her room, hand heavy on her shoulder.

“You like it, don’t you?” she throws over her shoulder at him as they walk. “The ashes, the anhilliation.”

“It’s beautiful,” he says, voice low and warm, and she shivers.

* * *

Apparently Eden is his bunker, and the signs and slogans on the walls are the trees and the flowers and the birds.

* * *

As soon as she is well enough to tuck the pain into the back of her mind the claustrophobia sets in.

She would rather have the pain. The pain is safe, _ familiar,_ a preoccupation. Without it there is no escaping the fact that she is buried alive. She thinks of a book she read Before, of a man with locked-in syndrome, his mind a butterfly, his body a diving bell. 

There are no wings here. Just tombs, eating her alive, swallowing her whole, and the diving bell is sinking steadily towards the bottom and she’s trapped inside.

“Why did you bring me down here?” The question is really an accusation and they both know it. “I can’t bear it, I can’t breathe.”

“Did you expect me to let you turn to ash?”

Her answer is sure and clear.

“Yes.” Then: “You betrayed me.”

His sigh is long suffering. 

“I saved you, too.” He shrugs as much as he is able with his injuries, then goes on. “You know, I truly wanted you to have freedom of choice. But you chose _ wrong _.” 

“So you chose _ for _ me.”

_“_Yes_.”_

He can’t see the abhorrence in taking away her free will, because he gave her her life in return for it. He doesn’t acknowledge that he still holds it in the palm of his hand. She wonders how long before he drops it.

He is not the kind of man that should ever hold something precious in his hand.

He takes a step towards her, but stops when she takes a step back. For now he seems content to let her believe that his touch is something negotiable. 

“I won’t allow anything to happen to you. Ever.”

* * *

Not once has he said “I told you so”. 

Not _ once._

She could almost kiss him for it.

* * *

While she’s busy learning how to breathe underground he goes from herald to king. Somewhat recovered he rules his underworld with an impatient, hungry knife, with wildly mercurial emotions, with flashing eyes. 

There are hundreds of people down here, and they are all his.

His temper is cinder in the desert, electrical storms overhead, and he reaches for pain like an old lover. When he’s bored. Frustrated. Angry. 

Trapped.

He’s a man that shouldn’t ever be confined. 

His left hand is always shaking, shuddering, ugly convulsions travelling up to his shoulder. Permanent brain damage. Perhaps from one of her kicks. Or punches. Or maybe it was when they both fell out of the sky and back down to Earth.

It’s the hand he uses when he cut into people that have _ really _ angered him.

She knows everything about this, because he keeps her with him always. She’s rid of the chains during what passes for daytime now, but he doesn’t trust her enough to ever leave her unattended. So she’s the spectre haunting his torture chamber, sitting wrapped in red shadows as he spills blood and redundant confessions, doles out punishments and whims. 

She thinks it’s almost a dance to him. After a while it _ becomes _ a dance. She learns his moves where she sits in the corners, and she thinks that he’s a terrible man and a connoisseur.

“You must stop hurting them,” she tells him. 

“I’m not sure I can,” he answers.

“But all these people, they’ve already confessed and atoned.”

His grin is hungry, feasts on all the light.

“New sins. News sins all the time.”

“Or maybe you just like it.”

“Maybe I do.”

At night he chains her still, before leaving for his own room. She’s always relieved to see him go, even though she sleeps in his old shirt every night.

His smell is comforting. His smell is safe.

But she knows that it’s really a lie.

* * *

“I can’t believe we both slept through the end of the world.”

“That grieves you, doesn't it? You wanted to see it.”

“Yes.” His smile is dreamy and slow. “I wanted to see it all. I wanted to see it up close.”

* * *

She sees ghosts.

Nick Rye is wheeling Kim past her room, baby Carmina held snug and safe in Kim’s arms. But the little hand reaching out of the blanket is skeletal, and Nick and Kim’s eyes are black and dead as they silently look at her.

Sometimes Hudson stares down at her from on top of the stairs, skin peeling off her face like sheets of Saran wrap.

“Do you think they’re haunting me?” she asks him, because she’s got no one to really _ talk _ to but him. “Do you think they blame me for being dead, for not saving them?”

“No,” he says, almost kindly, because he’s got lots of other people to torture besides her, “they don’t know. They’re not here. They’re gone. It’s your guilty conscience conjuring things up.”

“So you do think I have things to feel guilty about.”

“Yes,” he says, “of course,” and his smile is as vicious as she’s ever seen it.

* * *

“Aren’t you curious?” she asks.

“About what?”

“Why I didn’t kill you.”

“No.”

“Fine.”

* * *

“Maybe _I’m_ a ghost. Maybe I can walk through walls. Maybe none of this is real.”

He reaches out with his bad arm, and this time she lets him touch her. He strokes her cheek, and she can feel the vibrations of him through her skin.

“You’re not a ghost. I can see you, and touch you, and if I cut you you would bleed.”

“Would you?” she whispers. “Would you cut me?”

“No,” he says quietly. “I won’t, because I think you want me to.”

He steps closer, and she can feel his breath across her forehead.

“I made everything worse. More people would live if it weren’t for me.”

“Yes,” he says simply, but she can’t cry. He sees her trying though, and hands her his Book of Joseph. She never did find out how he got it back.

“Here. I want you to have this now.”

She should tear it to pieces. She should burn it. Spit on it.

She can’t bring herself to do it. She’s holding what remains of his humanity in her hands. She can’t throw it in his face.

So she nods at him, and take a step back, away from his touch.

She sleeps with the book under her pillow. 

She will keep it safe for him.

* * *

One night she wakes up when he slides into bed behind her, pulls her back into him, encloses, warms. 

“I waited, but you never came to me.”

She can feel herself return into him, _ merge_, like it hasn’t been months or maybe years, sink into his contours and into his skin.

It’s almost involuntary, and it almost like she never were gone.

“Do you know? I only really wanted you to be safe, and mine, and now you’re both.”

He pulls her leg back over his waist and pushes inside her, groans into the back of her neck. She slides her hand under the pillow and touches the book even as she cants her hips to take him deeper.

“How I’ve missed you.” The words tangle about the shell of her ear.

_ Goddamn you _ she mouths out into the room. She doesn’t know if she means him or her.

But she knows she’s real now.

* * *

She comes back from the canteen and finds that her room is someone else's. Her things are in his quarters, the book under his pillow, her portrait on his wall.

“You’ll live with me from now on. We spend all our time together anyway, and you’d loose the chains at night.

“Ok,'' she says.

They both know she won’t kill him anyway.

* * *

He asks her to become his executioner.

“Well, why not? You used to be a _ natural _ at it, darling.”

At her look he smiles and relents just a little.

“It’s only when absolutely necessary,” he explains. “But it's a delicate ecosystem, this. Many hundreds of people trapped in a confined space. Untoward things will happen, violence is bound to occur

(_he’s the only one allowed violence, it’s for him, only him. and maybe her) _

and we need to stamp it out swiftly and efficiently. We can’t afford kid gloves. We must make examples out of the worst ones.”

“You know, we could just open the hatch and evict the culprits.”

“No. I want a spectacle.”

“Of course you do.”

He rocks back on his heels, holds his shaking hand still with his good one.

“I can ask someone else. It’s just that I thought you’d _ want _to.”

She’ll do it. She will.

“But I thought you liked killing,” she says anyway and he shrugs and she, well she understands. He’s not interested in that final part. To him, the death is where the fun _ stops._

* * *

She loses pieces of herself all over his bunker and he walks behind her and picks them up and puts them in his pockets.

* * *

She finally realises she can do some good.

They are the world’s 

_ (oh wait, the world is gone _)

the _ bunker’s _ worst yin and yang, black bleeding into dark grey, jagged and uneven and _ blurry. _But now she can temper him some. Slake his worst impulses and his bloodthirst with her body. Take him inside her and stroke nightmares from his brow in the middle of the night. 

Try to prevent him from lashing out at the flock under his command, trapped as the poor bastards are underground with a demon.

It gives her something akin to a purpose.

Without a purpose she would be dead.

* * *

She traces the swallow on his hip one night, draws her finger along the wild lines. 

“You like that one, don’t you?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Do you want one of your own?”

She doesn’t hesitate.

“Yes.”

So he pulls her out of bed right there, and takes her down to his redundant confessional, old and new blood on the floor and walls. He strokes the old tattoo gun, unused for so long. Then he lifts her up onto his work bench, stands himself between her spread legs and inks a matching swallow onto her chest. He uses his bad hand, and the swallow shakes and jerks wildly around _ ‘wrath’, _uneven and jagged and broken in places.

She thinks it’s the most beautiful tattoo she’s ever seen.

She tells him, and he fucks her up against the old strips of skin covered in sins.

“Do you think there are any real swallows left? Up there?” she asks him as they walk back to their room.

“I don’t know,” he says and takes her hand, kisses the crescent moons her nails have made in her palm.

* * *

“Did you mean it?”

“What?”

“What you said just before you didn’t kill me.”

“No.”

_ I did,_ she doesn’t say to his retreating back, _ and I think that makes me worse than you._

* * *

She sees a swallow. Fast and sleek and so beautiful, flying round and round the perimeter of their room, just underneath the ceiling.

“Do you see it too?” she asks him. “The bird? The swallow?”

He squints at her, hair falling into his eyes, pillow imprint on his cheek. He doesn’t bother looking anywhere but her face.

“A hallucination. A reaction to being caught, trapped. Wing-clipped.”

He kisses her, and she snorts.

“Wing-clipped? This isn’t wing-clipped. This is wings ripped clean from the body.”

“_Your. _Your body. Say it. Don’t attempt to disassociate. Accept it. Own it, you're trapped.”

Even as she struggles to breathe she is faintly amazed that someone can be capable of such simultaneous cruelty and pity.

“‘God will salt the earth for seven years’. When our time down here is up, will you run from me?”

“Yes.”

She knows that some of their atoms are fused, they are conjoined, she knows that neither of them knows if she’s telling the truth, and she likes it like that.

He throws his arms around her, pulls her close, and over his shoulder she sees the swallow fly forever around and around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end, the bitter end. I actually ended up writing two different endings, and agonised for yonks over which one to use. In the end I went with this one for one reason: it was the very first thing I wrote for this story. I wrote this part intending to post it as just a one-shot. But then I started wondering what had led John and the Deputy up to this point and went on to write the ten chapters preceding it. As you do.
> 
> The book that Mallory thinks about is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby.
> 
> Thank you such a lot to those of you that have been reading along and commenting and giving kudos. You guys are all totally fucking awesome.


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